What I Won’t Miss About the City: The Pressure to Go Better Myself

I’ve tried to be cultured, I really have.  When you live in the greatest city in the world, you feel almost a compulsion to do add a little refinement in your life.  The feeling just nags at you: what are you doing living here if you’re just going to sit at home watching “The Office”?

So even if you don’t like opera, you try to go once in a while, even though opera is absolutely HORRIBLE.  It really is. I’m sorry, I know that it’s really great and all that, and I’m a terrible person because I don’t appreciate it enough, or really at all.  But to me it’s a lot of not-such-great acting and singing in that wierd voice that doesn’t sound all that human in a language that I don’t speak.  I pretty much only speak English.  Not a lot of opera in English.

And you also have to go to galleries and museums and all that.  I tried to do that, joined the Apollo Circle at the Met — okay, let’s be honest that it was my WIFE who joined and brought me along — which was fun because we got to go to parties and stuff.  And I like looking at art a lot better than sitting through opera, although I know almost nothing and, at this point in my life, don’t have the time to learn.  But I like me the pretty paintings.

The problem is that there’s just so much pressure when you live in the city to do those types of things, a built-in guilt trip every time you pass the Moma or the Guggenheim and realize that you haven’t actually walked inside in like five years. I’m sure a lot of people who live in the city have done a better job than me at all that stuff, and I tip my (baseball) cap to them.  But I’ll bet a lot of other people are more like me — more  in love with the IDEA of being in such a cultured city, but less in love with the actual, you know, going out and doing stuff.

So while I miss the energy and excitement of the city, I don’t really miss that guilt trip.  Now, I have an excuse as to why I haven’t been inside a museum in five years, or haven’t gone to an opera in as long as I can remember.  I live in the suburbs, after all!  So much less is expected of me now. No more guilt. No more pressure.  Sort of the silver lining in the cultural wasteland that is becoming my life.

So that’s one good thing about living in the suburbs — no one expects that you ever do anything cultured and refine.  So you don’t have to.

Off to the couch.  Law and Order is almost certainly on.