Anonymous asked: just how expensive is it to live in NYC? I mean, what kind of "Value Menus" do you see at fast food places (if you even eat at those)?
This is my favorite question in the world, and it has been in my Asks since I turned on the damn thing (I know this because I learned to turn off Anonymous about as fast as you can say “What do your boobs feel like?”).
You are right, I do not even eat at those, but there are plenty of cheap places and ways to get by in New York without pretending you don’t know what money is or that debt exists or that you are not an adult that suffers consequences.
NYC can be stupidly expensive, okay it is always stupidly expensive, but it can get grossly, stupidly expensive when you get too caught up in the bullshit. To me the bullshit means taking too many cabs and going to too many fancy restaurants, drinking four dollar soy lattes, hanging out in Anthropologie long enough that you start to believe 80 dollars is sort of reasonable for a peasant dress (I don’t know what a peasant dress is but I feel like that kind of encapsulates Anthropologie. That and those like, Gone With The Wind-dress looking shower curtains. GOD I WANT ONE.)
Anyway you can live in a far flung neighborhood or a really dreamy Brooklyn neighborhood even and get a roommate and COOK and maybe bring your lunch and maybe get a bike and not drink so much and hang out with people who think taking a cab home is excessive so you are shamed out of it, and it ain’t that bad.
If you really want to live in New York you can live in New York. I survived in New York making, oy, like a little over $1k a month for awhile. It bothered me sometimes, for instance when I needed to GO SOMEWHERE and had to walk because I couldn’t afford a metrocard, or like, I needed to eat (BORING!), but I knew I had made the choice to flail a little and try to become a Person and figure out what was important to me. It was empowering to know I had made that decision, even though I was kind of wishing I majored in computer science or that tampons were subsidized by the federal government.
“Living in NYC” and what that has meant to me changes all the time, and I am pretty sure it can be really dumb and life here can seem stupidly difficult for no reason pretty often, depending on what you are looking for in said life. So think about THAT.
If you’re set on it, you’ll figure out a way to make it work, I think (or maybe that is all the white hetero(mostly!) college educated privilege talking?), but your values, your expectations, your thoughts on peasant dresses, will change and change and change.
Also I used to have a theory that it takes everyone two years before New York stops freaking you out and making you miserable and incapacitated, but I keep meeting Younger Youngs who seem to hit the ground running / stealing everyone’s jobs / being good at the internet, so maybe not everyone spends the first two years panic-buying American Apparel hoodies and Malboro Menthol Lights on a credit card they can’t afford to pay off? But I think if you do that you should forgive yourself. But don’t do it!
(also you do not need to move to New York anymore because there is the internet, remember!!)
Also truth, I find Subway™ to be very comforting. No matter where you are, you pretty much know what the Subway sandwich is going to be like, and it will be much like the Subway sandwiches of your youth, and it will be under five dollars.
GODSPEED.
