Why are you here? Why, really?

I had dinner in Marseille one evening this past June, with a Japanese woman and two French men. I had met the Japanese woman and one of the French men on the top of a hill, by the entrance to an old world war two bunker, as I contemplated sleeping there for the night. The view and the air were magnificent, I was fresh from a swim, but a cold breeze was blowing and I didn't have a sleeping bag or even any long sleeves. A couple of nights later I slept up those mountains, and discovered a more pressing and painful reason to stay indoors on Provençale evenings: mosquitoes that settled on my eyelids for a midnight snack, as I dozed amongst the wild thyme bushes, by the open bay, filled with the mediterranean sea.

Anyway, the couple invited me to dinner and so I found myself sitting in a car with them, snaking around the Marseille backstreets, looking for a parking space. They dropped me off on the corner where they had arranged to meet their friend, and I was given a description and instructed to wave. He found me first, he had apparently been instructed too. And we went to have crepes in a little Cuban place. The second French man - the one that found me in the street - had spent a year in Sweden some years previously, and so, over dinner, he and I conversed in languages that were not our first, he in Swedish, which amazingly, he remembered very well, and me in Danish. And for the most part, we understood each other. It was fun, being an Irish woman and a French man, sitting in a Marseille cafe, speaking Danish and Swedish together, and understanding each other.

I feel called upon to explain myself, sometimes. Do you know that feeling? But this is a BIG topic, and it's important to differentiate the various nuances of this kind of demand.

So, for example, I had an unsatisfactory exchange with an MTA official one afternoon, involving delayed Q trains and bus transfers and changed minds and unlimited cards that said no, no no... and we had something of a heated interaction that probably could have been abated had I EXPLAINED my actions clearly enough for her to understand that they were in perfect synch with her rules and to just press the beeper on that big beeping door that lets people through when there's been some sort of fuckup with the turnstiles, or they have big luggage or babies.

So there's that kind of explanation. The functional kind. The kind of explaining you do when you go to a fancy cheese shop and you need to communicate your desire for particularities.. or the kind of explaining you need to do when you go to a dentist with toothache and you want to give her more than a hunch about what ails you.

And then there's the kind of explaining yourself that your schoolmistress demanded of you when you rocked into school wearing contraband mascara and The Wrong Jumper.

And then there's the sort of explaining yourself that is demanded of you by a lover, when you've broken the invisible contract that he has in his head, because we have these invisible contracts floating around inside us, and we don't usually even know about their existence ourselves until they get broken, and suddenly we're upset.

Or the sort of explaining that some people feel some innate need to do, to EXPLAIN their existences altogether, and this can, sometimes, lead to the making of music, of paintings, of tall buildings, of businesses, of children, of novels, of poetry for some, or to the purchase of very large and unattractive cars, for others.

And then there's the sort of explaining that you can see being asked for in someone's eyes when they meet you for the first time in a context that they really don't expect to find you in, perhaps, and their eyes hold that demand for explanation from you, in a quizzical sort of way, without any overgroundness in it, and without any real expectation of being addressed or given. And the whole process is sort of inaccessible really, in these situations, because the following through of them demands some kind of social transgression in itself, some kind of breaking through of innocence that just isn't socially acceptable amongst adults, normally.

This happens sometimes, when I meet people. Often, the question doesn't get asked. Funnily enough, I was inundated by the question in Denmark. It was so much the only thing in the room there, when I met someone for the first time: why are you here?! Hvorfor er du i Danmark? Why are you here? In three and a half years I never had anything satisfactory to offer that one. Here, it seems to be more circumspect, tactful. But sometimes it gets asked, tactfully or not. And I still don't have an answer.

Nothing more than this,

today

The last time I looked at the telly

was sometime this summer, and there were ads on it for a kind of birth control pill that reduces a woman's periods to four times a year.

There were ads for viagra on mainstream tv, not just in your spam folder.

I was at a screening of old propaganda ads from the forties and beyond, at Barbes recently, a lot of fun-to-look-at images of bugs bunny and tap dancing starlets strongly selling war bonds during ww2, and there was one particularly memorable set of ads telling people what to do in the event of an atomic bomb blast. They should hide under the sofa, apparently, and put one hand over their eyes and the other over the back of the neck. So there were lots of images of people running into doorways in this recovery position, and leaping under beds, as the white heat of mushroom clouds ascended throughout the land. And the daddy of the family was always on hand to say, ok family, it's safe to go outside now. That radiation will have passed within ten minutes of the blast.

Yeah.

Well, this summer I saw an ad that seemed to be directed toward children, asking them what they would do in the event of a terrorist attack. And to the parents, have you educated your kids well enough? Does everybody know what to do? And it seemed to be left open ended, with overtones of guilt, that if you haven't instructed your children in the proper procedures for coping with a terrorist attack, that you were negligent as a parent, without actually giving any sense of the implications of what such an attack might entail. And truthfully, anything that any bureau of intelligence can come up with in this regard seems to be undermined with disturbing regularity, by somebody who's put a couple of cornflake boxes together and watched an episode of McGyver.

But the news is still the same: it's every man, every man for himself (and for his own family). Like the salt sprinkles out on the street. There are no city-sponsored common area trucks that go around sprinkling salt on the street, like they do in snowy weather in Denmark. This place is operating as a city of sole traders, functioning on its OWN. And it's ALIVE.

One from the afternoon

I was dreaming of a high sitting
blond haired make up man
who asked me how I coped with being so beautiful
when you came
and vibrated
on my coffee table
looking for a place that kills things cheap and happily.
It ain't me, babe. No, no no
it ain't me babe.
It ain't me you're looking for
babe.

A holiday medley, off key

There's an ad campaign for something or other, on several subway trains at the moment. It runs the entire carriage with ideas like "You didn't wait 12 months for a set of dishcloths", and "Visions of socks and underwear never danced in your head". Well if you're waiting for anything for 12 months the most you're likely to feel at the end of it is the kind of relief you get when you finally hit that porcelain after a long pee-holding-in stint... and actually I have had that vision of socks and dancing underwear. I testify.

I had a brief conversational interlude yesterday over breakfast with a pair of chess players and the topic of sentimentality arose. One of the chess players mentioned a Mariah Carey song (oh she who is so bountiful in this emotion) and how it was steaming with what he called "fake sentimentality". And I wondered aloud, "well, what is REAL sentimentality? Is sentimentality ever real? Isn't that an oxymoron?" I suppose an answer to that could be that actually, it's real sentimentality if the person feeling it is buying into it at the time, perhaps. But any definition of real that means authentic and actual (yeah, concepts galore, but maybe you know what I mean) to me, doesn't include sentimentality. But it's an interesting question.

And so, in this spirit, with this little question mark of sentimentality over my head as I step down into the spaghetti junction at Pacific street, I remember my iPod. And as the q train chugs out over the Manhattan bridge with a vibrant peach and rose sunset backlighting the Brooklyn Bridge, and the statue of liberty somewhere in between (can you believe I never noticed it in that picture before?) my fingers reach quite naturally for Rhapsody in Blue (the Previn version). Gosh, though. It really does mine that seam. If you're looking for exquisitely elegant sentimentality, Rhapsody in Blue is probably what you're looking for. 'Specially with that view. Woman can only take so much of this vibe, however elegantly drawn, and so I switch to New York Counterpoint as I emerge from the 6 at Lafayette street.

And go walking through Soho.

And this is some of what I see...

The skyline on a red label on a courier bag
A middle aged man sending an email on his Treo
A Grace's Market NY bag
A massive vinyl image of clueless beauty at East Houston and Lafayette
Tits in a car window on Lafayette
Some famous actor looking angry and withdrawn and cold
Very well made beautiful shoes
Exquisite long johns
An art deco parking garage
Midnight blue
Avoca wool
A woman surrendering to the image of one she believes to be more beautiful than her
A woman luring another in from the streetside of the window of her shop

As I skirt along Spring...

A well dressed woman pulling trash out of a clean, freshly painted dumpster
The waft of shish kebabs
Tall thin blonde women who might be German metal head boys
Five inch patent heels striding indifferently across the cobblestones
A chef smoking a fag watching me walk down the street
The man transfixed at the "Gifts for Reading" table at the MoMA design store
An image of Kate Moss airbrushed (for she looketh like this no longer, if she ever ever did) into an alluring vision of expensive sundrenched fuckability (with impeccable hygiene and no past)
The man on the phone
Woman in mink
Some photos that look like mine on the wall by the escalator in Bloomingdales
The cold street
The evenly scattered salt on the pavement
The expensive looking graffiti that makes expensive mouths water
Healthy dogs in jackets
Look up! Look up!
The sight of an imposing Soho loft at Broadway and Broome
He eyes my stripey tights with glee
A boy sitting crosslegged in the freezing street, tap tap tapping on his 17 inch laptop
The Housing Works bookstore on Crosby, as I enter
"Archipenko adheres to the limitations of the block, finding within its confines solutions at once simple and complex" on the first page of the first book I glance at: "Alexander Archipenko: Vision and Continuity", p. 120.
and I think of Dean street and 5th avenue
And I find a seat
and I sit
and type this from the notes in my small notebook.

They've discovered a void in the universe

and it's not just taking place in my Brooklyn afternoons. No, it's one billion light years in diameter. The mixing of space and time concepts alone is probably enough to make your brain synapses go gaga and span out for the remainder of the evening, but this is really very beautiful if you linger over it a little.

Void (not pigs) in SPACE!

Hurrah!

Caught in the act

I don't know about you, but these two look to me like they've been having just a little too much fun...

Oh sweet

Three cheers for the nose!
Hip hip hurrah!
Hip hip hurrah!
Hip hip..
Elephants on the bbc

Some days are just cold and you wish you were drunk the whole way through them. Today has been such a day. Hence the bliss of elephants. And good red wine.

All we are saying... is Give Rats a Chance...

There's a new generation of rats in New York City.

They are not ashamed of their forebears, they are in fact proud of the fact that the rats of New York City did so much to contribute to the lasting legacy of the image of The Big Apple. The rats of New York city are legendary. But they have had a bad rap. And they have never been pretty.

However, there is now a new generation with new concerns, and this generation is, in keeping with much of the city they hold so beloved, that has sustained and multiplied them, feeling comfortable enough with their new status that they are keen to launch a pr campaign, in order to revamp their public image. It's a branding thing. And I am one lucky lady today, because I have gotten the gig. It's the highest profile job of my career as a rat finker.

It's also, I'm happy to say, an easy job. Because the rats of New York City have become a species for the city to be proud of. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been having meetings with some high profile leaders of the rat community here in the Park Slope/ Prospect Heights neighbourhoods and I have seen how they live. They have respect in their communities, they provide for their families, they live off the pickings of very sanitary rubbish bins and the very fine restaurant kitchens of the area.

Their offspring - ratlets I've decided to call them for the ground we can cover with the cute factor - are educated, well integrated into the community, and have ambition that their grandparents simply couldn't have hoped to have. They know how far it is possible to travel in this town; some of them have indeed ascended Manhattan's dizzying heights: you may know many of their faces, they have become leaders of business and industry and are visible, speaking their truth nightly on CNN and Bloomberg TV.

There are a few key concerns emerging from my conversations with the various rat communities of the city (and just like the human communities, the rat communities are diverse, in economic realities, education and prospects) that the rats on the ground would like to have addressed in the wider community, and through their media representations. They are fully aware of the centrality of their role in the New York story, which is comparable with, though inherently different from, the centrality of the cockroach community in the life of the city. And it's time for payback, now. It's time for recognition. Language is an important issue.

They have been inspired by the efforts of many minority communities in reclaiming the slang epithets that have been for generations used abusively against them. Street rats in Washington Heights and Inwood, the as yet ungentrified parts of Manhattan, aswell as many areas of The Bronx, have, for a number of years now, been fondly, informally calling each other 'vermin' and this defiant act of empowerment has been read as threatening by the human communities there. They wonder what the rats are planning and what is possible from here.

Well, most rats in New York City are really just very pleased to be earning a good living and having a warm home in a safe neighbourhood, and that's what we're really keen to emphasise in our public relations efforts. This is all about understanding between the two principle species in the city. Again, I am aware that our cockroach friends share the city equally as the third dominant species here, but they haven't hired me. Yet.

We all just want what's good for the children. Rat and baby, standing shoulder to shoulder, eating from the same bowl. And maybe this vision seems mad to you, seems so visionary as to be such a long way off, that it could never happen, that we humans could never see rats as an equal species, but here's where the fight begins. The fight of the triumph of human and, yes, vermin, understanding.

Made in China

I'm thinking of getting a t-shirt printed up that says 'Made in China' and go around being a piece of shit technology for the day. Maybe Christmas.

Somebody has a brilliant idea in Murray Hill (Bensonhurst)

Something I happened upon over on craigslist...

Donate to me (Murray Hill)

---

I want a million dollars. I think this is what I really need to actually start a life here in Manhattan. Please let me know if you are willing to give.
I don't want to haggle or trade - there are just so many people here with more money than they could ever need, I was hoping one might read this and share their good fortune.

Nobilitas Whippitas

Bad memories

Memories can be great even when they weren't pleasant at the time that they happened. Have you noticed that? Bad memories can be wonderful. Just because they happened. Because they had life flowing through them. Often, it's my guess, it takes years to really appreciate that.

Whippet love, 7

Brute whippet beauty

The Whippets, today

I don't know about you, but I can feel Pink Floyd's Time running through this picture...

Winter in Manhattan; bucolia in Brooklyn

I was in Manhattan yesterday, for the first time in a couple of weeks. God, it's different over there. They give you less time to cross the streets. The streets are wider. And the traffic goes both ways! This is the kind of thing that can cause havoc in the life of a Park Sloper. Arse was kicked, fun was had, long-since met friend was reacquainted, and corn muffin was bought in Wholefoods at 11pm.

It's winter in Manhattan, folks. I've been gambolling around in the pastoral beauty of autumn in Brooklyn (I don't know when I've enjoyed an autumn this much) but one visit to the Lower East Side was enough to confirm that even the seasons move faster in Manhattan. No leaves on the trees, no leaves on the ground. I think it might even be colder there.

Getting mixed up with the boogie

I remember a moment from the short time I lived in New Orleans. It was early August in the French Quarter, a day or so after the hurricane winds brought all the hot torrents of rain to drench us. Those rains sent me into the Marriott Hotel on Canal street to get dry before getting soaked through again. I squelched across the lobby to the ladies, sat under a hand drier for half an hour, then met the rain again, walking almost the full length of Canal street to the St. Charles streetcar which carried me home to Prytania street, more soaking than I have ever been before or since, in clothes or out of them. An evening beer has rarely tasted so good.

By then, I had decided that I was pretty much living in New Orleans. I just couldn't imagine leaving. It was a common and pernicious kind of experience that happened to people when they spent more than a wild weekend in Nola. She sort of seeped into you. It was the magic and the sensuality and the earthy natural energy of the place, mixed with the boogie and the pollution and the swamp magnetism, that made it a very easy place to get stuck in, especially when the humidity was high. It was also incredibly easy to find your way through, once you actually slipped under the skin of Nola.

And right after the heavy rains, it was quiet in the quarter. Summertime was low season, anyway. Even at that, I never really spent much time in the French Quarter, I usually hung out over in the Marigny, or uptown altogether. But this evening I was strolling past Jackson square, along St. Ann street, and there was a man standing on the sidewalk, in under an awning to shelter from the rain, a dark figure on a dark and by then lightly rainy street, and he was singing a tune to the hot mist and the rain and the empty street as I walked through it. And I saw him and listened to his song, and he didn't have a go-cup sitting by his feet, or a cap upturned to catch passing falling change, and he was just standing there, eyes closed, enraptured, singing to the street, the sound of his heart calling out to the air in Nola to meet him there, the sound of the life of Nola meeting him there, the life of Nola inside him, where she dwelled, rightly. And I watched this man, and I felt it, I got it. This was really the only appropriate response to the question of New Orleans. To sing to her, to woo her, to love her in the way she likes, with softness on a hard day, with boogiesounds, with rhythm. And so she comes rushing in.

Cities live inside us, in ways we don't always recognise. Places do that, whether city or wild nature. And cities have character, have spirit, that magnetise us in different ways, bring out different aspects of us, depending on the particular vibe of the particular city. They bring out different activities, too.

I spent January of this year in Barcelona and Berlin. Barcelona was warm and sunny, and I swam in the sea and strolled around in my high heeled boots, wandering through the labyrinths, hanging out in the Plaças, kind of entranced, for the most part, and spending my days with a new friend I made on my first evening there. It's always fantastic when you meet a fun chica friend, and in Barcelona, that would be Tina.

And then I went to Berlin, and there was a hurricane on the second day, and it was dark and cold and I wandered the very wide streets and felt the blood of northern europe circulating in me again, and I found it hard to get talking to people and I felt kind of lonely so I bought a notebook and three crayons and made my fun inside that notebook wherever I wandered, in my Barcelona high heeled boots.

I snaked around Europe this year, ended up in New York city on what seemed like a whim that landed me home. That's what this place feels to me. Home. Home is, of course, a moveable feast, when you live the way I have these past few years. But home also feels like staying. Here.

First days in Nashville

The first place I landed in the United States, the first time I came here, in 2001, was Nashville, Tennessee. It was, and probably still is, one of the strangest places I have ever been, though that trip took in a lot of strangeness in Memphis, New Orleans, St. Louis, Chicago and New York city too.

Nashville was actually a good introduction to what's going on in America. Because what's going on in New York isn't it. What's really happening in America is actually what ISN'T happening here.

So in Nashville you could see the general trends of American civic planning (such as the concept can loosely be applied): stripmalls, sucked out downtown, suburban sprawl, car dependency, highways leading to picket fenced enclaves, hives of wooden houses, spaciously laid out, that looked like multiple zippers from the airplane. The house I stayed in for four days was one of the spokes off of one of those zippers.

I had come to Nashville in an act of pursuing the truth of things. The truth bit got sorted out pretty fast. In the airport, in fact.

I had fallen in love with a man I had met in Dublin while he was on tour, playing in Vicar Street, the large music venue where I worked in the evenings as an usher. I showed him a bit around Dublin, we laughed our arses off through the streets, and continued to stay in touch for another nine months after that. He had been based in Chicago, was a very successful sideman drummer, and then he got a woman pregnant kind of randomly, and she lived in Nashville, so he moved there. Left his life and the fundaments of his career in Chicago, and walked into some kind of a void where his son lived. He had no relationship with the mother of his son, except that she lived in a little town called Lebanon, outside of Nashville, and so they travelled over and back from Lebanon to Nashville, sharing the care of their son.

He lived on McGavock Pike, must have been thirty miles from downtown, with nothing but a Dollar General store, a Subway sandwich shop and a gas station nearby. And that was a LOT! He had the bottom floor of a house that he shared with the owners, who nominally lived upstairs, but who were regularly on tour, so they only touched base at home for a couple of months a year.

This was the house where he was falling in love with his child, and pouring his energy and vision into this small developing human. He was finding the music scene in Nashville a struggle: it's heavily studio based, and cliquey, and definitely un-idiosyncratic. His vibe was more live-led, making records to tour behind, and even after he moved to Nashville he found that his main source of income was going on the road. He was already finding it a struggle to be away from his child, even for short periods of time. So it was all new, and he was still trying to work it all out, when I arrived at Nashville airport, one afternoon in June, 2001.

A bit over nine months after the birth of his son, after daily emails and the occasional phone call, I had come to find out. As soon as I saw him in the airport, however, I found out. My heart sank. Why it sank, we can debate or wonder about, or guess at, but it will only be guessing. I don't really know the answer to most why questions, though sometimes I have strong hunches. This one was just a question of different realities unable to meet. I suppose I wasn't ready for the life of a Nashville housewife, and that was the position available in that particular household, however much fun this particular dude could be, to hang out with.

I didn't want to hang out with him, though. At all. The practical facts: we literally couldn't communicate, about the simplest things; he lived in the middle of stripmall-land out in the sticks of suburban Nashville; I couldn't drive; his days were spent in childcare. Four days of that and on the fourth day I moved into the Drake Inn Motel, on the Murfreesboro road, that had a big neon sign out the front saying, Where The Stars Stay.

Just banging tunes and DJ sets and dirty dance floors

I'm whippet sitting again this week. I get to see the whippets in their winter garb. Must post some pictures of these supermodels. So I'm sitting in sauna-intense heat here in Park Slope, because these gals don't like to be cold. And heat does funny things to me. I like to round off my showering experiences with a cold shower, for instance. I LOVE a cold shower after a hot one. Been doing this every day for a very long time. Like to swim in cold water too. It's interesting how the application of cold outside makes warm inside. Cold makes hot. Rough makes smooth. Untempered heat makes me woozy and sleepy. Immersion in a contrasting cold, makes life spring and dance and encourages lots of Arctic Monkeys on iPod moments on 7th ave.

So I've had an afternoon of sex and WC Fields movies and I'm having thoughts like, I wonder if I'll ever make something of my life. This sort of thought is not so long-lived, usually. But it's a fair question.

I was thinking about this sort of thing as I strolled through the park in my pyjamus yesterday afternoon. There are a lot of interesting and talented people in this town who are pushing middle age and just getting by, barely. They have skills that aren't in demand, that aren't particularly saleable, and even if they do have saleable skills, they probably don't have either inclination or suss to put it together in a money-magnetising way. Shagloads of talented people here are getting by on ten dollar an hour jobs, or jobs they hate but which have benefits, chief among these benefits being that they don't have to be there very often. People have to pay the rent. And what they do, what they consider themselves to 'be', doesn't pay it. And probably never will. So they play a gig a month and play in their friends' bands, and there's a scene, and it's interesting, but this is new york and no one is getting paid.

It's something I want to explore. Because in every other country I've lived in (hmmm... not so many, but I get around...) there exists a space in between the avant garde/outer periphery of music and art culture and the dead mainstream. In different countries, that space is of different sizes, but it exists. So in Denmark, for instance, there are a lot of musicians making a living, making music. Some of them are even making a living at making music of their own. Jazz musicians get paid decent money there. And there are gigs to be had, and they pay well. The system is unionised, and there is a union minimum that band members have to be paid. Of course there's a lot of un-unionised work that gets done, but by and large this stuff pays well too, AND it is out of the tax loop. The basic standard of living is very comfortable in Denmark, and being a musician is not something that anyone there seems to be expected to trade any of that comfort for, in order to pursue.

In Ireland, there isn't quite the Danish socialist welfare and benefits blanket at the base of society, waiting to catch anyone as they fall. If you fall in Ireland, you crash, it's true. But if you fall in America, you crash and you can burn too. But you can soar in Ireland, and you can soar here, above the clouds..

Music is not unionised in Ireland, though my dad was heavily involved in the musicians' union there when it had a heyday, and it wasn't pen-pushing work that those guys had to do in those days. Dad told me stories of having to show up at pubs that had refused to pay the band the night before, and argue rightness until the pub-owner coughed up. My dad was never any kind of a heavy handed intimidating type, but he was intense and earnest when it was called for. Anyway, now that there's money in the country, things are different. But the average pay for club-date type gigs there, is still about half of what it is in Denmark.

But people go out in Ireland. And they like to hear music. And they follow local bands. So actually, you can be in a band in Ireland, and have local popularity, and get by for as long as you're popular. Sure, things probably run out of steam in the mid-zone at some point, but my point is that I don't see very much of that mid-zone here in New York (granted I've not been seeing much outside of Dean street and 5th avenue here in New York this past couple of weeks, but I do have very good intentions of getting out more. Problem is that in is just so damned interesting).

Things are very splintered and niche-ised here. Everyone's a specialist. Everyone's catering to a very specific need. In many ways, it's like a city of phD's. How you fare financially depends very much on the demand and value placed on that particular niche. So if you're a burns litigation lawyer or an eyelid surgeon, you'll probably be earning quite a bit of cash, because everyone who needs their eyelid tending to or who wants to cash in on the pain and suffering caused by an over-hot McDonalds coffee, will hear about you and your intensity in the area, and away you go.

But if you're a rocknroll musician and you're really quite good, but you don't quite live the life and say what 20 million teenagers want to hear, well, chances are you'll be spending your middle age getting settled into your stable of cat and dogsitting clients, or putting up little signs in Key Foods, selling GUITAR LESSONS from a Juilliard trained professional of 20 years experience, to the local 4 year olds of Park Slope, whose parents are reaching for excellence, and demand Juilliard for their $40 an hour tutoring fee.

But New York city draws people like those squidgy sticky mats that everybody uses to catch their cockroaches and mice in their overheated New York city apartments. We all just NEED to be here. Of course, it's just because we're all here that we all need to be here. We need the proximity to each other. We're excited, stimulated, inflamed by that. And the rest of it. The mix. The low high and medium all jiving together in the space of a block. The crazy shit on the side of passing trucks. The endless relentlessness of it all. The energy tsunami, the suck of the best you have to give.

And you know, when you come and live in a place, and you've been there for ten years, and everybody you know, like, love and work with lives in that place, it just becomes your home and moving anywhere else is just absurd. So you take that shitty accounting job for two and a half days a week and grit your teeth and count the seconds.

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