In the News: Heavens! Could it Be That Young, Bright People Are Leaving the Suburbs and Moving to the Cities?

July 17, 2010 by

A few months ago, we noted a Brookings Institution report on the rise of poverty in the suburbs.  That report has now started to generate some chatter, with the Wall Street Journal taking the data and speculating breathlessly that the rise of suburban poverty is associated with the startling idea that young, upwardly mobile people are starting to choose to move to cities:  “In a historic first, many young, prosperous Americans are moving from the suburbs to the city.”

Similarly, the Huffington Post reported a Brookings demographer saying that “what used to be white flight to the suburbs is turning into ‘bright flight’ to cities that have become magnets for aspiring young adults who see access to knowledge-based jobs, public transportation and a new city ambience as an attraction.”

For a second, I was starting to wonder about whether I’m on the wrong end of the trend — that the suburbs are winding down and everyone’s moving to the cities.  But here’s the thing: young, prosperous Americans HAVE ALWAYS MOVED FROM THE SUBURBS TO THE CITY.  That’s actually the WHOLE POINT of having cities, so young people can go and get educated and get cool jobs and drink fancy drinks and dance in clubs and meet other young people and fall in love and get married, at which point many of them MOVE BACK TO THE SUBURBS.

That is, I have absolutely no doubt that young people are moving into the city.  That’s what I did, back 20 years ago when apparently the suburbs weren’t a haven for poverty and ruin.  I was DYING to move to the city after growing up in the New York City suburbs.  I loved the city so much that when I got a job clerking for a judge in Uniondale, I commuted an hour each way just so I wouldn’t have to live in Long Island (no offense, guys…).  That’s what young people do.

So I’m not so sure what news people think they’re breaking.  Maybe next week we’ll have a “trend” report that old people are FLEEING THE NORTH and moving to Florida!

Yes, young people are moving to the suburbs.  Like they always have.  The bigger question is whether they’ll stay there once they’re not so young anymore, or, like me, they’ll give in to reality and exile themselves back to the suburbs.  At the very least, if they start moving back, they might help that poverty situation that seems to be generating so much buzz.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why the Fourth of July is the Best Holiday of the Year — Particularly When You Can Watch Fireworks from Your Home

July 1, 2010 by

I love the Fourth of July.  It’s absolutely the best holiday of the year, much better than Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Christmas is great, particularly when you’re a kid.  But as an adult, Christmas is mostly a big pain.  You have to go buy a bunch of presents, stress about whether you need to buy presents for this or that person.  You have to figure out how much to tip various people in your life  (the guy who delivers the newspaper, seriously?) .  And I always end up having to go to like a million holiday parties all through December, which just leaves me a big soggy fat mess.  And, of course, not everyone celebrates Christmas, so we all end up in that ugly “if you say ‘Merry Christmas’ you must hate the Jews, and if you say ‘Happy Holidays’ you murdered the baby Jesus” fight every year.

Thanksgiving is great, and everyone who matters (i.e., Americans) celebrate it, but it’s also kind of a pain.  Lots of travel, all that cooking, and half the time I end up getting sick and lying on the bathroom floor groaning all day Friday.  That’s not a fun holiday.

New Year’s Eve sucks.  Don’t talk to me about New Year’s Eve.

Memorial Day and Labor Day are just three day weekends.  One of them starts the summer, the other ends it, and I can never remember which is which.

Valentine’s Day doesn’t count. If you don’t get the day off, it’s not a holiday. Sorry, honey.

The Fourth of July is just awesome:

  • We all get to celebrate. You say “Happy Fourth of July” to someone, you don’t start a culture war.
  • The weather is great.  A summer holiday.  Sadly, no football like Thanksgiving, but you can’t have everything.
  • It’s easy.  To celebrate the Fourth, you need a pool, and a barbecue.  You’re done.  You want to get a couple of sparklers, go nuts.  Throwing hot dogs and hamburgers on a grill is nothing compared to figuring out a stuffing recipe for a turkey.
  • No obligations. No church, no temple, no getting dressed up.  Bathing suit.  T shirt.  That’s the uniform.  I know that some towns have a reading of the Declaration of Independence, which sounds just wonderfully patriotic but a horrible distraction from eating more hotdogs.
  • It’s not a “family” holiday.  No traveling 200 miles in traffic to see that uncle who put his creepy hand on your knee when you were 12, or your mother’s cousin’s estranged aunt or whatever.  If you like your family, spend the day with them.  If not, no one’s going to guilt you for blowing them off.

And, of course, you get fireworks.  Glorious fireworks.  The sun goes down, the fireworks go off, you eat some watermelon, you relish the fact that you’ve got another two months of summer.

So I love the Fourth of July.  In fact, it was one of the real, if minor, selling points of this condo we bought.  From our terrace we have a full frontal view of Memorial Park in Nyack, which is where the village has its fireworks show every year.  It’s like having an apartment on the Upper East Side overlooking the East River fireworks, except, of course, that it’s not.  It’s in the suburbs.

So not the same.  But fireworks are fireworks, and this year we’ll be looking at them from about 200 feet in the sky, almost eye level with where the explosions happen.  And I guess it’s not as good as having that Upper East Side penthouse, but it’s a lot better than standing on a crowded, hot street in Manhattan shoulder-to-shoulder with about a million other sweaty people and craning my neck to see the show.  I’ll be in a chair.  Drinking.  So that’s pretty good.

Happy Fourth of July!

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Is that a Big, Giant Pipe in Your Living Room, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

May 27, 2010 by

The condo we bought in Nyack was on the market for almost four years. It was one of those brutal stories of a seller putting a home on the market at the beginning of a bad real estate market, and pricing it just a little too high for the market, and then continually reducing it time after time, each time just, still, a little too high.

One of the reasons I think the condo sat on the market for so long is that it was very idiosyncratically furnished.  It was gorgeous, with what were obviously very expensive furnishings.  But they were a little bold for most people’s tastes — think the Liberace suite at a Vegas hotel.  Okay, now ramp it up about 20%.  There you go!

It’s actually a decent lesson about real estate, from both sides.  From the seller’s side, it’s important when you’re trying to sell your home to “depersonalize” it as much as possible.  Buyers sometimes have trouble seeing through the visual effect of a very intensely decorated home. Usually, of course, the challenge to the buyer is overlooking stuff like dirty windows, ugly furniture, and the fragrant wafting of cat piss, but sometimes it can be something as simple as a very tasteful, but highly stylized, method of decorating.

From the buyer’s side, though, it’s the reverse. It’s easy to fall in love with an immaculate home, and tough to fall in love with a place that makes you gag.  But the smartest buyers realize that when the seller leaves, he’s taking that stupid cat with him along with all his disgusting furniture.  That’s where the deals are.  You buy a home in lousy condition (aesthetically, I’m not talking about something that’s falling down), you probably can get more of a discount than it will cost you to get it back up to shape.

So that’s kind of what happened with us.  The seller had the place decorated to her taste, which was not universal, and I think a lot of people had a tough time seeing through it for the underlying value.  But when she left, a lot of that stuff went with her.

One thing that didn’t go with her — actually, two things — were these giant plaster columns that were in the entry to the condo.  I don’t know anything about anything, so I’m going to call them Corinthian Columns, although that’s almost certainly wrong.  But you get the idea. Floor to ceiling plaster columns with intricate design work.  Perfect if you’re making a speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president, not so good if  you’re a relatively mild-mannered couple who has a greater need for, for example, a coat rack.

So we decided to take down the columns, which we would replace with something a little less grand and little more functional.  That’s when we discovered that one of the colunns concealed a floor-to-ceiling exhaust pipe.  Big, black pipe, all the way from the floor to the ceiling.  Ugly.  Massive.  Maybe that’s why they built a column around it.  The column wasn’t great, but it was better than this pipe.

Of course, it was too late to do anything about it.  One of the columns was already down, and we’d started demolition on the other.  So we’re going to have to get creative, maybe redirect the pipe into the wall or something.

All of this, of course, is costing me a good deal of money.  When people say that living in the suburbs is cheaper, they don’t count stuff like taking down columns and, maybe, having to put them back up again.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Return from Exile: Take Me Out to the Ballgame!

May 10, 2010 by

One of the things I miss most about living in Manhattan was the ability to take a subway train to watch a baseball game.  As I’ve noted before, I’m one of those horrible heretical fans who roots for all the New York teams, so I used to love hopping the trains to go to either Shea or Yankee Stadium.  Going to Yankee games was always better, of course, not just because the team was better but also because Shea was a dump and the 7 train is a horrible, horrible train that seems to stop at every stupid street corner in Queens.  Seriously, can’t people from Queens walk a few blocks?

As much as I love football, there’s no question that it’s more fun to go to a baseball game.  Watching football live is a great experience, but baseball live is better for a bunch of reasons.

  • If you’re a football fan like me, the idea of watching only one game at a time is ridiculous.  You only get one day of games a week (other than Monday night football), so you have to maximize your football intake in that narrow window that you get.  So pretty much every Sunday, I used to hit the Gin Mill on the upper west side to eat the best and probably least healthy chicken fingers in the world and watch every game at once.  I do the same thing now, just at a bar in Nyack with much less tasty chicken fingers.  But watching just one game at a time is torture.  You don’t have that problem with baseball, since there are baseball games pretty much every day of the week and you don’t feel like you’re missing something if you’re actually at a game.
  • Watching football live makes you much more aware of all the artificial stoppages of play.  Moreover, you have to watch the halftime show instead of getting highlights, which is more torture.  In baseball, the play stoppages are more natural: at the end of innings, pitching changes.  Baseball is a terribly slow game, but at least you don’t get all these times where everyone just stands around waiting for the commercials to end.
  • Football is played at a bad time of the year in every kind of weather, usually very, very bad weather.  And because the tickets are so expensive, you end up going even when it’s raining and snowing and so cold that your testes freeze up (if you have testes, otherwise I guess some other plumbing freezes up).  But baseball?  Beautiful spring and summer weather, and if it rains they don’t play.  And if they play through the rain but you don’t want to sit there, you just don’t go and you eat what is likely a much less expensive ticket.

So going to baseball games is just the best. And being able to spontaneously decide to go to a game because you could hop a subway and be there in 45 easy minutes was one of the great things about living in Manhattan.

That’s one of the real pitfalls of living in the suburbs — the fact that you have to plan ahead, that you have to drive, that you have to park, and that you can’t drink because you have to drive home.  Just the worst.  No more spontaneity.  No more making fun of people sitting in traffic jams as you head to the subway, because you’re now one of those people.

With that in mind, I made my first trip into the city for a game this past week, trekking out to the new Yankee Stadium.  I only made one game to the new stadium last year, and only one trip to Citifield, what with the move and all, so I was looking forward to it.  And, of course, because I was so completely terrified of the traffic problems, I left like hours before I needed to.  The game was at 7:30, so I left at like 5PM, figuring that I wouldn’t get parked until 6:30 or so.  But of course for whatever reason there was no traffic, and no parking problems, and I end up in my seat at like 5:45, which is a ridiculously early time to arrive for a baseball game.  There were like kids running around on the field.

It did give me time, though, to check out the new stadium.  It’s actually pretty interesting how the Yankees and Mets took such different tacks in designing their new stadium.  The Yankees basically rebuilt Yankee Stadium as an exact replica of the old stadium, not just in the dimensions and the cosmetic touches but with everything. Yes, there are more luxury boxes and restaurants and food and stuff, and it’s a lot nicer walking around the concourse that is open to the sky rather than under a forbidding concrete roof, but it’s pretty much the same feel as the old stadium.  Nicer, but the same.

Citifield, though, is a complete departure from Shea, which makes sense insofar as Shea was a craphole.  While the Yankees had a stadium that was filled with all this great history and grandeur, the Mets had one of those awful all-purpose parks that was not so great for baseball.  But that freed them up to do a lot of cool stuff, and design Citifield along the lines of all those brand new baseball-only parks that have been the rage since Camden Yards opened about 20 years ago.  The end result is that Citifield is a MUCH better place to watch a game, which I know is heresy to Yankee fans but is simply the truth.  The team stinks, of course, which is more than a little important, but the ballfield is really nice.

That said, now that I’m driving to all the games and having to park, we’ll see how I like it when I have to stow my car over by the old World Fair grounds or under the Van Wyck.  At least I don’t have to make 45 separate stops on the stupid 7 train anymore, though.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs, Return from Exile Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Lessons for Exiles: Hiring an Interior Decorator When You Suddenly Have an Empty House to Fill

April 28, 2010 by

There comes a time in many a young man’s life when he has to hire an interior decorator. Not every man, of course. Many men go their entire lives without experiencing the joy of interviewing a group of what are invariably straight women and gay men who will explain to them about color coordination and fabric samples.

I am not, though, one of those men.

Most people who live in the city don’t need interior decorators, by virtue of the simple fact that they don’t have a lot of interior to work with.  It’s not worth paying someone to help you decorate 500 square feet.  It’s only the seriously wealthy with multimillion dollar 3 bedroom coops and condos who can even make use of a decorator.

But when you move to the suburbs, you suddenly find that you have to fill up all that new space, that you’ve gone from two bedrooms and a living room to four bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and a family/great room and a foyeur and maybe a few other rooms to boot.  It’s like someone leaving the military whose wardrobe consisted of uniforms, two pairs of khakis, and some tshirts suddenly needing to figure out what business casual means.

You don’t absolutely NEED a decorator, of course.  You can do it all yourself, if you have any kind of design sense.  But, man, it takes a lot of time, so if you’re a busy type who has a million other things to worry about for the new home, it’s not a bad idea.

We had actually used a decorator before to reasonably good results in the city, after we did a combination/renovation of our apartment to create a two-bedroom with a lot more space.  She helped us buy a lot of new stuff.  But even with that, we were going from 2,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet when we moved to the suburbs, so we thought it would be helpful to have someone help us with it.

With regard to the expense, it’s really not so bad.  The basic value proposition most interior decorators provide is that most of their fees are offset by “decorator discounts” that they get from furnishing retailers — that is, you have to pay them, say 30% of the value of the furniture you buy with them, but they get you a similar-sized discount off the retail price of that furniture.  I’m sure that really savvy shoppers can finagle their way to some of that “decorator discount” on their own, but, again, then you’re spending all your time trying to find furniture rather than, you know, your actual full-time job.  Decorators also charge a manageable hourly rate and maybe a consulting fee, but in the grand scheme of everything that you spend to furnish a new home, it doesn’t really move the needle.

So it worked for us. It might not work for everyone, but this was our first big new home together, and it’s a great space, so we wanted to do it right.  And, frankly, we didn’t trust ourselves (particularly me) to know things like what colors and patterns go together.  You’d be amazed at what is actually fashionable design-wise.  There seems to be a fine line between “bold” and “ludicrious,” and I’m not so sure that I can see it.

If you’re going to hire an interior decorator, though, a couple of things I’d recommend to keep in mind:

Fees in Writing. Get all the fees in writing, and make sure everyone understands what you’re paying for and what you’re not paying for.  We once had a problem with a decorator because she believed she was getting paid even for furniture we found on our own (which is not unreasonably necessarily, just not what we expected).

Get the Discount.  Make sure you’re getting that decorator discount, and even condition the fees on it.  We had another issue with a decorator when we were paying 30% of our purchases, theoretically getting a 30% or so discount off the retail price, then found our couch offered for about 40% off to the general public.

Hire someone you’ll like.   This is a bigger deal than you think.  If you meet a bunch of decorators, you’ll find that they’re all probably pretty good.  They’ll all show you pictures of their work, and most of them have a fairly broad palette so they’ll work with your particular tastes.  But you’ll also probably find that you just LIKE one of them more.  That’s actually important, because you’re going to spend a lot of time schlepping around places looking at furniture, so it’s kind of nice to have a designer that is pleasant to be with.  You might be inclined to hire some scary genius who intimidates you, on the theory that they must be good if they’re that overbearing, but you’ll have a miserable experience working with them.  That’s no fun. Life is too short to be running around sample stores with some jerk.

In our case, we had a bunch of good people come through to pitch the job.  We liked them all, really liked two, and ended up loving one of the two.  So far it’s been great, although we still don’t have any actual furniture yet….

Filed Under: Advice, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Lessons for Exiles: The Challenge of Decorating an Actual, You Know, Home

April 22, 2010 by

When you live in Manhattan, the biggest challenge you face in designing your home is trying to find places to put all your stuff.  When you’re living in 800 square feet, pretty much everything you buy has to be multi-purpose — your dining table doubles as a desk, your living room couch is your guest bed.  Most of my life in the city, I ate dinner on a tv tray sitting on the couch.  Our dining table, which we only pulled out for guests, was this clever foldout that seemed to defy the laws of physics in its ability to convert from about an 18-inch end table to seating for six.

In the city, square footage is at a premium. I actually convinced my wife that we needed flat screen TVs with the argument that they were SAVING us money, because they freed up floor space that cost like $1,000 a square foot.  You put a TV on the wall, you open up like 10 square feet — that’s $10,000!  That was a good argument to win.

But when you move to the suburbs, no matter where you move, you’re going to double or triple your square footage, so you all of a sudden have this enormous obligation to buy a lot of stuff.   Now you have a dining room, so you have to buy an actual dining table that doesn’t fold up like an accordian when you’re not using it.  And you have actual guest bedrooms, so you need places for them to sleep.

Sadly, they don’t just give you all that furniture when you cross the border into the suburbs, you have to go and buy all that stuff.  It’s one of those hidden expenses of living in the suburbs, like property taxes and car insurance, that you don’t generally prepare for when all you’re thinking about is how much cheaper the actual real estate is.  Congratulations, you now have a 4,000 square foot colonial with five bedrooms!  Now take out your credit card so you can fill it up with a bunch of stuff!

And it’s not like you can put it off. There’s nothing sadder than popping in on someone who moved out to the suburbs a year ago, and you find that they’re still storing boxes in the guest bedrooms.  You gotta suck it up and buy some furniture for those rooms.

So that’s what happened to us.  We had a little bit of a head start, because in 2005 we combined our apartment with the one below us, so we went from 600 square feet to a relatively, for the city, roomy 2,000 square feet.  We bought a lot of stuff back then, but we still were going from 2,000 square feet to 4,500 square feet, with all sorts of new rooms to fill up.

Here’s what happens when you start trying to fill it up:

  • You’ll start to resent your friends.  The idea of spending a few thousand dollars for a bedroom set for guests is galling.  A bed is like $1,000 right there, plus they need a headboard, and a table, and some sort of dresser, and, you know, towels and stuff.  Who do these people think they are?  What is this, a hotel?  Bring a blow up mattress, you’re lucky I’m not making you sleep on the couch.
  • You realize how much stupid, useless furniture you need.  When you live in the city, every piece of furniture is important.  In the suburbs, you just need lots of stuff so that your place doesn’t look all empty.  Who has end tables in the city? Who has a foyeur?
  • You realize how expensive it is to cover walls.  In the city, you maybe have five or six actual walls to cover up with art and stuff, once you take out the walls with lots of windows, kitchen walls, etc.  Now, in the suburbs, you have like thousands of feet of bare walls.  Start shopping.

Assuming you end up keeping the stuff you had in the city, that you haven’t been living all this time with the milk crates that you bought in college as your bookshelves, you’ll probably at least be able to use some of your city stuff in the suburbs.  What happened with us is that everything we had got downgraded a level.  The stuff that we just bought for our living room ended up in the family room, requiring us to buy all new stuff.  And our bedroom set became a guest bedroom set (which frankly is more than you deserve, you freeloaders).  I guess it makes sense: as you get older, you hopefully have more money and can afford better stuff, so your new stuff is nicer than your old stuff.

So be prepared.  If you’re moving to the suburbs, don’t put all your money into your down payment, because your real estate closing is just the beginning of all the crap you have to buy…..

Filed Under: Advice, Best of, Humor, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: ,

In the News: The Brookings Institution Reports that Poverty is Rising in the Suburbs

March 30, 2010 by

This is not such good news for us suburbanites.  The Brookings Institution released a paper recently entitled “The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008.”  The gist  is that poverty in the suburbs is on the rise, particularly due to the recent economic downturns of the past few years —  by 2008, suburbs were home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country, particularly in midwester cities.

This is an interesting development, insofar as it bucks the stereotype of “cities =poor, suburbs=wealthy”, which is obviously a legacy from the original development of the suburbs as a place where wealthier cityfolk went if they wanted to escape from urban problems– particularly the “white flight” of about 40 or 50 years ago.

I’m not so sure this is such a big deal.  It makes sense that as the suburbs got more fully developed, they developed the same economic stratification that evolved in the cities.  And it’s probably more a reflection of the economic difficulties in general than anything intrinsic to the suburban life.

Interesting, though.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

A Fan of New York: Confessions of a Sports Polygamist on the Eve of Another Glorious Baseball Season

March 1, 2010 by

Thank God it’s baseball season. Yes, I know that we’re only starting spring training, but March is an important month for sports fans, because it means that we’ve just gotten through the worst part of the year– the fallow cold depths of February, when football is over, baseball hasn’t begun yet, and basketball doesn’t matter yet.  When the highlight of the month is the Basketball All Star Game, we’re talking sports wasteland.

But once we stagger through February, we start a beautiful run:

  • March: March Madness, bracket pools, spring training.
  • April: the glorious return of baseball!
  • May and June: baseball in full bloom, and basketball playoffs.
  • July and August: more baseball, and football training camps
  • September: King Football!, and baseball pennant drives.
  • October: More football, and baseball playoffs.
  • November: Even More Football, and maybe some people get excited about basketball coming back.
  • December: FOOTBALL FOOTBALL FOOTBALL
  • January: Football playoffs, made sweeter by the looming specter of February.
  • February: You want to kill yourself. (Yes, I know you get the Super Bowl, which is fine, but it’s just one stinking game).

So we made it through another horrible, horrible February, which means that we have months and months of wonderful sports to come.

As you might have guessed, I’m one of those guys who loves sports, watches a ton of games, follows all the major sports (King Football, Baseball, Basketball), plays fantasy sports, all that stuff.  It’s the one “guy” thing that I do, since I don’t know anything about cars, can’t do much more than screw in lightbulbs around the house, have shot guns like twice in my life, etc.

And when it comes to sports, I have a confession to make: I am a New York fan.  As I’ve noted before, of course, I’m absolutely in love with New York City, which is one of the driving forces behind writing this blog — my commitment (however wavering) to maintaining my connect to this city that I love to death even while I was forced into exile.

But when I say I’m a “New York fan,” I’m more precisely referring to my relatively odd and unusual quirk as a sports fan — I root for all the New York teams.  Virtually everyone else pledges their allegiance to one team or another — if you’re a Mets fan, you hate the Yankees; if you’re a Giants fan, you hate the Jets; if you’re a Knicks fan, you barely can even muster up enough passion to be mildly disinterested in the hapless Nets.  For most people, rooting for a team is like making a commitment to a spouse — you have to forsake all others.

Not me.  I root for them all, as long as they play in New York.  I’m like a New York Sport Polygamist.  I root for the Yanks, the Mets, the Giants, the Jets, the Knicks, and try to muster up a passing interest in the hapless Nets.  I don’t really follow hockey, but I root vaguely for the Rangers, and don’t really have any hate for the Islanders or Devils.  I love them all, so long as they are from New York (let’s just ignore the fact that the Giants and Jets actually play their games in New Jersey, which is an accident of geography and good taste).  That said, like any good polygamist, I do have my favorites — Yankees over the Mets, Giants over the Jets — but that’s only when they’re playing each other.  Otherwise, I always root for New York teams over any other city’s teams.

Most “real” fans hate me for that. Sporting polygamy is heresy.  Even fans that have weird non-geographic allegiances, like New Yorkers who like the Mets or Yankees yet somehow became Dallas Cowboy fans (largely, of course, because the Cowboys were good when they were growing up, and the Giants and Jets were terrible), look down on people like me who root for two teams in the same sport. I also get a lot of flack from out-of-towners who insinuate that I root for them all so I can talk smack about whatever team is good, which is totally true.  My friend Scott, a true Boston fan exiled to LA right now, get apoplectic that I can mock him for both Bill Buckner (Mets) and Bucky Dent (Yankees).

I don’t get it.  I don’t understand how “New York” fans can root against New York teams.  I mean, I see their point about committing to one team, but how can they ever root against a New York team?  You see these Met fans, who are also usually Jets fans who absolutely HATE the Patriots, but who will root for the Red Sox over the Yankees.  I totally don’t get that. I wouldn’t root for the Red Sox if they were playing Al Queda.

And there are, of course, some great advantages to being a polygamist New York fan. I get to count all the championships when smack talking with people from other cities. I double the odds that I’ll have a good team to follow in any given year. I can cherish the memories of all the great teams: the 1986 Mets and the 1998 Yankees, the 1969 Jets and the 1986 Giants, the Patrick Ewing Knicks teams and, okay, not so much with the Nets.

Most importantly, I get to save all my hate for the people who deserve it, like the people who root for Boston and LA.  I don’t waste that hate on the New Yorkers that I love.

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in Manhattan, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The SUMA Life: Our First Party, Superbowl 2010

February 11, 2010 by

I love Super Bowl parties.  As a sports fan, I recognize that the Super Bowl is way overhyped as a sporting event, and that some real sports fans hate Super Bowl parties because they take away from the actual game, but I love them.  I love the wagering, the chicken wings, the commercials, the whole thing.

So I’ve had Super Bowl parties at my place virtually every year for the past decade or so.  I can’t remember what year I started doing it, but it was largely because I got tired of casting about for a place to watch the game and just decided it would be better to bring the party to me.  And when we rebuilt our apartment so that we had a lot more space, along with a rooftop penthouse room with a flatscreen and outdoor space, the parties just got bigger, to the point that it became an annual bacchanal with probably 40-50 people.

So when I moved to the suburbs, I was adamant that I would continue to have the party, particularly because my new condo is an even better venue, particularly with a 90 inch projection tv in the family room.  I also realized that I could set up a secondary projector through Slingbox and broadcast the game in the living room, which for some ungodly reason has no actual TV, which would give me another 75 or so inches of gorgeous TV football goodness.

That said, I had two big problems.  First, I didn’t actually have the projector installed yet.  The people who sold us the condo had put in a state-of-the-art audio visual system in the condo, but it was state0of-the-art circa 2002.  And if you’ve been paying attention for the past decade or so, that state has changed just a little bit in that time.  So the projector they installed was the size of a suitcase, and probably cost as much when they bought it as a suitcase filled with gold bars, but it was completely inadequate for my needs.  And, of course, as a devoted procrastinator, I didn’t get around to actually figuring out how to replace it until about two weeks before the Super Bowl, which ultimately necessitated an enormously rushed and expensive job to get a new one installed and set up to work on the ridiculously elaborate system that’s set up in the condo.  But we did it.

The second problem was, of course, that no one who came to my old Super Bowl party in the city particularly wanted to come to my new Super Bowl party in the suburbs.  Getting people to leave the city to visit you in the suburbs is hard enough, getting them to leave the city on a Sunday when they can watch the Super Bowl at a million good bars is even harder.  So I did everything I could to make it easy, luring them with promises of homemade lasagna (promise fulfilled) and homemade ice cream (sadly, promise broken), and arranging for pickups at the Tarrytown train station so they could get an easy back and forth.

Amazingly, I got a good crew coming out from the city.  More interestingly, I was surprised to realize just how many of my annual Super Bowl party crew has actually moved out of the city in the past few years. It never occurred to me when I held the party in the city how many people were driving into it.  So maybe half the people who were habitual invitees actually had an easier trip than they used to have.  Which was great.

It’s one of the things that sneaks up on you.  When you leave the city, you think you’re leaving all your friends behind.  But your friends are getting older too, and what you find is that a lot of them are already gone, or on their way.

So our first suburban party was a pretty good success.  The one great wrinkle we had this year was that we made up a board with those boxes (the ones where people put in a few bucks to buy a box, and then you assign numbers for the team scores for each quarter) on one of the walls in the living room.  We haven’t painted the place yet, so I got a special dispensation from the wife to make up the board on the actual wall, using tape to mark off the boxes and giving everyone a piece of paper so they could stick it right on the wall.  Much better than cardboard!

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

Suburban Rite of Passage: Shopping at Marchalle’s

February 2, 2010 by

I have never been a big clothes horse.  At least, compared to what you see in the rarified air of Manhattan, where even straight men do things like get bespoke suits (a term I only even learned a few years ago), and read GQ, and actually, you know, have a sense of fashion.  I don’t keep track of whether my lapels are supposed to be wide or narrow, or what kind of vents I’m supposed to have in my suits, or, frankly, what vents actually are.

Essentially, the extent of my fashion knowledge boils down to some basic points that I’ve gathered over the years:

  • Three button suits, which were really in a few years ago, are not so in.
  • Double-breasted suits, which haven’t been in for a while, are still not in.
  • Pleats go with cuffed pants, flat fronts with no cuffs (I think).
  • In casual wear, don’t tuck your shirt on (it took me a long time to grasp this).

My only real fashion principle is that I throw out my ties every few years, sometimes if only because of the tomato sauce stains that end up on the ones I have.  But I also know that the fashion police have realized that ties are the one relatively affordable item that even fashionphobics like me will bother to replace periodically, and so they reinforce that impulse by making ties the one “fashion statement” that even schlubs like me can grasp and follow.  So ties get fat, then they get skinny, then paisley is in, then paisley is out, etc.  That’s why when you watch a late-90s sitcom like Frasier, where all the characters were ostensibly fashion plates, you see Frasier and Niles wearing dark shirts or those goofy ties, and realize just how old the show is.  Essentially, replacing your ties is a lot cheaper than replacing your suits, so the fashionistas change tie styles often enough to at least force the schlubby to go shopping every few years.

So the general point?  I’m not a big fashion guy.  That said, I’ve always had at least some degree of “Manhattan fashion sense,” which basically boils down to having a lot of black clothes.  Now that I’m in the suburbs, though, I’ve started to notice a change.  Less black, more jeans, more super-casual wear.

It’s a slow change, but it’s starting to happen. I can feel my impulse to put on dressy clothes when we go out ebbing, as I realize that I’m very overdressed for the crowd at the local restaurant or even at a bar or something.  What passes for normal on the upper west side, or even the lower east side, seems like pretension in the local Nyack eateries.

Thus, it was with some degree of fascination mixed with revulsion mixed with anticipation that I stepped into Marshalls for the first time.  Marshalls, the epitome of the suburban “place to buy clothes where you don’t really care what you look like anymore” mall store.  Or, as we call it in the suburbs, “Marchalles,” with a frenchified accent.

And, you know what?  Not so bad!  Lots of ridiculously cheap stuff that is clearly not “trendy,” but reasonable looking and ridiculously cheap and, have mentioned, ridiculously cheap.  I’m not going to buy a suit there, I haven’t fallen over that cliff (at least not yet), but got a couple of pairs of jeans (one fashion principle I refuse to accept is the idea that, one pair of jeans is different from another pair of jeans), a bunch of very discounted “Life is Good” t-shirts that I wear around the house or theoretically if I ever go to the gym, and some socks. Socks are socks.  These ones were socks like other socks, but cheaper.

From a SUMA perspective, here’s the way to think about Marshalls. If someone opened a “remaindered” shop somewhere in Dumbo, or in some burned out storefront on the lower east side, and didn’t put a sign out, and spread the word through Twitter or whatever about the amazing deals you could get on cheap jeans and tshirts and stuff like that, all the trendies would flock to it in that “semi-ironic so we don’t admit that we’re doing something uncool but really in our hearts we know that we’re being ridiculous” way.  They’d all be telling their friends about this super-great discount store that popped up, and they’d be staggering out laden with all sorts of cheap booty that they’d wear ironically.  Take out the burnt-out storefront, and the underground viral whispering campaign, and replace it with a big airconditioned supermarket clothing store filled with suburban housewives, and that’s Marshalls.  Same stuff, just a different attitude.

So Marshalls is okay in my book.  I just have to squint a little to blur out what it is I am actually doing, and keep repeating a mantra to myself that an $8 tshirt that I’ll wear about 100 times in the next few years is a great buy.  Fingers crossed, though, that I never get to the point that I’m buying my suits there……

 

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, Suburban Rites of Passage, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , , ,
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