1. The news is all around you
Prior to New York I lived in Geneva, that small, picturesque town in Western Switzerland where people eat a lot of cheese. Geneva is quiet. While a disproportionate number of newsworthy events do actually occur there, given its status as home to some of the world's most important international organisations and banking institutions, it is nevertheless what you'd call a pretty - dare I say - boring place. Something about the combination of wealth and high prices, a transient population that comes and goes and rarely puts its roots down, and unnaturally beautiful surrounds and suspicious cleanliness, make Geneva feel rather isolated from the big wide world. Living there, I became quite the news hound, CNN on in the background (it was also the only English-speaking channel available on my TV) every evening, BBC online at my desk every morning, and a variety of news blogs throughout the day. There was this conscious sense that I had to keep up, that something could happen - aliens could land in London, the US could carpet-bomb the Middle East, Australia could just float away into the Pacific - and I could go on living my life in Geneva without the slightest idea. It really had that kind of place-at-the-end-of-the-earth feel about it, and I spent half my time there trying to prove to myself that I really was engaged with the world around me, that I wasn't in fact imprisoned in some sort of beautiful snow globe, impenetrable by global forces or even by time itself.
In New York, while I admit the snow globe feeling has remained, to some extent, I have totally lost the desire to read or watch the news. At first I attributed this apathy to the hectic pace of life, but after a bit more careful introspection I realised it was more than that. I still spend just as much time, if not more, at my desk every day, and I still am just as unproductive and procrastination-prone as I ever was. It is only that I have stopped choosing news as my form of procrastination (preferring, instead, I admit, to read various restaurant and bar reviews, a curious new hobby that will have to be explored at a later date). This shift in interest, I put down to my newfound instinct that if something is newsworthy enough, New York will bring it to my attention. News is everywhere here, sensationalised by the cable shows, shoved in your face in the form of a free newspaper on the subway, emanating from neon signs on the sides of buildings, told by one New Yorker to another in the grocery store queue. If something important happens, New York knows about it first. In fact, until New York knows about, it's not important. Why bother informing yourself with all the news of sub-par importance to be found on the internet when New York, that great arbiter of style and change and progress, will let you know if there's anything you need to worry about?
2. People come to you
I spent, all up, almost two years living in Geneva, and another almost-two years in London. While I could convince my parents that the long and expensive plane flight from Australia to Europe was worth it to visit me in London, I couldn't extract the same committment when living in Geneva. Last year, they flew all the way to Europe but convinced me to meet them in Berlin rather than traipsing to Switzerland. "You've spent the last year telling us how boring it is," they responded when I asked them whether they wanted to visit Geneva; "why would we want to come there?" They had a point. We went to Berlin instead, and they went on to visit my sister twice in the year that she lived in New York.
Geneva was not the kind of place people visited often, despite my encouragements. When I moved there the second time round I sent out a mass email entitled "1001 reasons to visit Switzerland" in which I implored my friends and family to come and stay with me and make my life there a little less tedious. But in New York - no such encouragement is necessary! People visit here by the boatload! I've been here for three weeks and five people I know have been through town. Two more arrive this week, another two before April. I've got more visitors than I know what to do with. And therein lies the rather expensive flipside to this whole visitor-thing which I never quite appreciated while I was recruiting them back in Geneva - every visitor wants, not only your undivided care and attention, but also entry to a cool new unknown restaurant that everyone is talking about, a tour of Williamsburg, and "the best night of their lives" whether that be a Tuesday or a Friday. Oh, I'm not complaining - I find having old friends come through this big, intimidating city to be a real source of comfort, and of course everyone likes showing off what a cool and interesting life they lead. It's just that now I feel the pressure to develop a cool and interesting life (and find out what, exactly, is the new unknown restaurant that everyone is talking about) to show off. In Geneva, I'd just take visitors outside, point at the lake and the mountains, and say "well, that's about it!" Here, you have to work hard to find the real New York, and even harder to find a kind of New York you want to introduce your visitors to.
3. If you stand still, you get dizzy
I've been really sick all weekend, and have barely left the house - except to pick up supplies, including the latest Vanity Fair, echinacea tablets, a tonne of vitamin C-rich fruit, and chocolate-chip cookies, for good measure - since Friday. It is the first time in three weeks that I have had some real down-time and my aching body is thanking me for it. But at the same time, my head has been going in circles. With only a dirty window with which to peek out into the dark city around me, it has become, in my imagination, bigger and more unconquerable that I had ever thought. Ever fear I've had about settling in in this city, about making it my home and finding friends and succeeding at work and building a reputation has surfaced and grown in strength over the past two days. Fears from which I've heard not a peep since arriving in New York. All of a sudden, they're here. Because I stopped, and let them in.
So, my new plan, once my immune system is functioning again, is just to go with the flow. When you're in the centre of the world, and everything is spinning around you, you've got to keep on moving, from one day to the next. You can't stop and think about it too long, or try to watch it all spin past. It just makes you dizzy. Just keep moving, spin with the world, and you'll be fine.
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