Beats For Only You (And You, And You)

For the last six years, New York Magazine has done their annual “Reasons to Love New York Right Now” roundup. It’s sprawling, comprehensive, and totally current. Translation: Pretty rad.

A love affair with this city, its boroughs, its neighborhoods—that’s nothing novel. But the reasons why, whether they’re newsy-now happenings or straight-from-the-gut musings: Those have personalities all their own. My own list doesn’t function like a beat reporter’s, because that’s not what I do. They’re heartbeat reports, if anything. They’re the reasons that I Love New York Right Now:

1. Because everything that’s hate-worthy about the country—congestion, consumerism, greed—all looks perfectly in place when framed by an F train window rolling over the Culver Viaduct after sunset.
2. Because when you sit down on the train next to someone using a cassette walkman, it’s neither strange nor ordinary, neither expected nor wild.
3. Because as great and towering as this city is, it still allows you to hold onto enough of yourself that you’ll never compromise your convictions about never eating anything that comes out of a truck.
4. Because your fashion rules don’t apply to us here, but ours apply to you there.
5. Because fourteen local stops from Midtown is a real escape, not merely the kind of escape people tell themselves is within reach just to feel better.
6. Because not only do we all have therapists and coffee shop allegiances, we’re expected to.
7. Because you don’t know me, and I don’t know you.
8. Because you know me, and I know you.
9. Because we’re New York, and that’s all we’ll ever have to say. And we know how that sounds. And we’re very okay with it.