Well, the First Year(s) are the Hardest Part...

As of this Friday, I will have lived in New York City for one year.

Graduate school, otherwise known as The Reason Why I Live In The City (and I need to keep reminding myself, it's not The Socializing or The Drinking), was tougher than I had expected. Last summer, I remember receiving my class schedule and cackling, thinking about how easy it would be compared to getting up every morning and being at work by 8:00 (or, who am I kidding, closer to 8:30 on most days). Heh. I am nothing if not a jackhole. I didn't count on muddling through the required reading - usually 200+ pages of dense text per night. Or how long it would take me to remove the massive writer's block that had developed in the 10 years I had been out of undergraduate school. Or my confusion in trying to follow the nearly incomprehensible class discussions about racism and social welfare policy while at the same time attempting to overcome my lifelong fear of public speaking by volunteering to participate in those discussions.

I also didn't predict becoming what I had dreaded - The Graduate Student. For most of the year, I desperately needed a haircut. I hardly ever applied make-up. I started wearing sweatpants to class, and my face broke out. The cleanliness of my apartment degenerated until it could have qualified as a superfund site. My eating habits went to shit, unless daily visits to the school vending machine where I ate Mix N'Yogurt while chugging a Diet Coke with Lime are to be considered a diet plan.

I moved into the city convinced that this was the end of my dating life. Everyone had stories about how hard it was to meet people, and I truly believed them. (In retrospect, I'm not sure why I thought it would be harder to date here than in suburban Jerz, where everyone is either married or very, very young. Or a guido.) I briefly dated my friend BG; that ended when he drunkenly announced that he was falling in love with me and then promptly disappeared for the next 10 months. At the end of the summer, I was with S, a Republican who was in NY visiting his best friend, my good friend, JP. A scant two months later, I hooked up with JP (awkward!) which resulted in a duplicate walk-of-shame up 10th Avenue where I passed a nun, presumably on her way to church to pray for my black, black soul (I blame the entire incident on an afternoon Yankee game, a schoolwork-light weekend, and unlimited T&T at Doyle's). While all of this was going on, I joined Match.com, where I was obsessed with a really intelligent, funny artist for about three weeks until I realized that I wasn't attracted to anything other than his mind, and went on a date with someone who later e-mailed me to ask if I "minded" if we did not become "lovers".

November arrived, and I reconnected with JJT when B came into town to run the marathon. I had known him in high school but we had not stayed in touch. I was convinced that our meeting again was fate and I constructed an elaborate romantic scenario for our future. Unfortunately, JJT was...not so much on board with this vision, and we dated for 3 bumpy months (I should have realized the futility of our relationship when he demonstrated a strong committment to his omnipresent blue hoodie and weekly binge drinking). I knew it was over when he failed to call me for a week. I was proud, however, that a few weeks later, I managed to resist calling him at 4:30 am after a long night of drinking on the LES just because I was near the Williamsburg bridge, and could presumably walk to his apartment (my friend JT calls this my "superior critical-thinking-when-drunk skills". Heh.)

In late April, I met M. We dated until he decided to move to Dallas. And then decided to break up with me in early July, one full month before the move. I'm trying to stop thinking about him, but I don't suppose that listening to this song continuously is helping that process along.

It's been a sad year. A joyously happy year. A crazy year. A quiet year. And I wouldn't change a thing. Maybe that incident with The Republican.