It’s late on the first Sunday of the year, at the end of a very busy and eventful week. (Pushing the envelope, my brother and his family and I went to an indoor water park today; four hours of chlorination and artificial tropics—it was fun, but a bit much.)
My trip to NYC passed in a blur. A lot of restaurant meals, a couple movies (“There Will Be Blood” and “The Savages”, both worthwhile, the former another standout work from Paul Thomas Anderson), a Broadway show (Pinter’s “The Homecoming” in a funny-scary production with Ian McShane), and a day of art at the Met and MOMA. I was gratified to realize, in a variety of ways and moments, and often, that I made the right decision to leave. I could feel the stress coming off city residents in pulses, and was told by one friend that “calm” was coming off of me “in waves.” I kept thinking I was going to feel a moment of regret. Quite the opposite: I very soon found myself thinking, I can’t wait to get back to my life. I do think that to live in NYC and have a life like the one I have here would be very worthwhile; I imagine that such a life would feel rich (and one would probably need to be rich). But since I don’t have that life, I don’t know that it would feel better. I was also struck by how much New Yorkers like to complain. I was a sounding board for a lot of people in a very short period of time, and often as not it was not something abstract or remote they were complaining about. It may also be the people I know there. I will just add that a number of people also said they would love to get out of the city, and can still say that I am glad I did.
As for events on Thursday in Iowa, I have been cautiously wondering which of the several qualified Democratic candidates to support, and have been biding my time because this has been an unbearably long run-up to this first contest, and we still have nearly an entire year until November. Many things will happen between now and then. It’s appalling that for several months we had eighteen (qualified) candidates for the highest elected office in the land without a single candidate running as an independent. Speaking of the kind of change Senators Obama and Edwards (and Governor Romney) love to espouse, that is one thing that needs to—more independent candidacies. (And let’s stop calling them third-party.) I did not expect things to turn out quite as upended as they did, but am not at all sorry about the results—on both sides. But it is time to think about how far we have fallen behind, and about how lousy we feel about it deep down inside (on all sides), and about who really shows the potential to change that—or be that.
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