Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: The Pressure is Off!

October 3, 2012 by

One of the great things about living in the suburbs is that the pressure is off.  What pressure?  That unrelentingly guilty feeling that you’re always missing out on something, that you should be going to more concerts and theater and museums and clubs, and bars, and hot new restaurants.  That nagging voice in your head saying that if you’re living in the city you should be taking advantage of living in the city:

What?  You’re going to stay home and watch The Voice? What’s wrong with you?  Artcat just posted that a series of Sara Swaty portraits exploring gender identity and the body is opening this weekend at the Leslie-Lohman Museum!  The 37th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival is in previews on Theater Row!  And you’re going to watch TV?  What a plebian! What a vulgarian!

Sometimes, living in Manhattan can be mentally exhausting.  There’s just TOO MUCH to do, too many choices, too many decisions to make, and you’ll never get to everything.  Even if you go out every night, you’ll never even scrape the surface of all the shows you should be seeing, art you should be appreciating, food you should be trying.  Think of it this way — New York City has 24,000 restaurants.  Even if you eliminate the half of them that are the various warring Ray’s Pizza chains, that’s still 12,000 places to eat.  365 days a year, 3 meals a day, it would take you almost 12 years to try them all.  That’s a lot of miso-glazed cod.

Another example: right now, at this moment, there are about 25 shows playing on Broadway, and almost 60 off-broadway.  That’s 85 shows.  Go see one a day, and you might get through them in three months, at which time about a third of those shows will have closed and been replaced.  And that’s not even counting off-off-broadway.

It’s a cultural treadmill, and the guilt trip never ends.  Just pick up a copy of the Times, and you’ll see pictures of society events you never have the time to go to, reviews of restaurants you’ll never try, profiles of bands you’ll never hear.  And, even worse, it seems like EVERYONE ELSE is somehow finding the time to get more out of the city than you ever will.  You finally get out to a club, only to be told that you REALLY should go there on Tuesday nights.  Tuesday nights?  People go out Tuesday nights?  Seriously?  What do they do all day?

That’s what’s nice about the suburbs.  Yes, like everyone says, there’s not a lot to do.  But in a lot of ways, that’s a blessing.  Fewer choices, fewer decisions, easier to focus.  Rather than trying to stay afloat in an unrelenting cultural stream, you have to actually seek out opportunities for interesting theater, art openings, new restaurants.  They’re out there – even in the suburbs, there are some good restaurants and galleries and concert halls. Not as many, of course, but that’s the point.  Because the choices are fewer and further between, you don’t have that pressure to ALWAYS BE DOING SOMETHING.

So you get to give yourself a break.  It’s not your fault.  You’re living in the boring old suburbs!  So what else are you going to do but sit on your couch, put your feet up, and guiltlessly watch some lowbrow reality tv?

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , ,

Understanding the “Bridge and Tunnel” Crowd, and Why There Aren’t Any Good Clubs or Lounges in the Suburbs

June 22, 2012 by

When I resigned myself to a life in the suburbs, one of my goals was to try to find nightlife opportunities that would give me some semblance of the experiences I used to get in the city.  Now, let me be clear that I was not a big nightlife guy in the first place.  In my 20s, my usual nightlife routine was a night playing pool at the lost and lamented Amsterdam Billiards or getting a beer in a neighborhood bar.  Part of that was that I was, as they say, “living in the 80s and making in the 30s”, so I didn’t quite have the bankroll to hit a club. It’s a lot more fun to go clubbing if you are (a) a rich guy, or (b) a hot girl.  I was neither of those things.

Even as I got older, though, and could afford the club scene, it was really only something I did once in a while.  Maybe if I’d been single, or liked dance music music, or liked standing, or liked tinnitis, or couldn’t do the math on the cost of buying a bottle of Grey Goose for $350, I would have been a bigger fan.  But it just wasn’t my thing.  Maybe once in a while we’d get together with a group, get a table at a club, and put a big hole in our credit cards to enjoy a night out, but it really had to be a special occasion.

Otherwise, as I got older, my main nightlife routine would be hitting a “lounge,” which is really a euphemism for “a bar that has the drink prices of clubs because it has couches.”  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate having couches in bars.  The world needs more couches.  And I guess I like lounges because they aren’t as loud, so you can have a conversation.  The world needs more conversation, too.  You can’t really talk in a club, which is actually generally a good thing because most of the people in the clubs don’t have much of anything to say beyond “hey, nice shoes.”

So when I say that I was hoping to find nightlife opportunities in the suburbs, I’m really talking about those kinds of lounges — places with couches, where you can have a conversation, maybe with a bartender who makes interesting drinks that involve something called “muddling.”  Drinks that involve “muddling” are always much more expense than the non-muddling variety, but they sort of justify the fact that you went out at all — if you’re going to just mix vodka and soda, you can do that at home.  You need a fancy bartender in some couchy lounge to make you something with 15 muddled ingredients.

Here’s the thing — they don’t exist in the suburbs.  They. Don’t. Exist.  There are no lounges.  In fact, there are no clubs, nowhere that you can, if you wanted that experience, go to dance and listen to music and become insensate from the ringing in your ears.  What you have in the suburbs is simple: bars.  Just bars. No couches. No muddled drinks. No dancing.

It’s actually a lot worse than I thought. I figured that with all the people who get exiled from the city to the suburbs every year, some entrepreneurial type would realize that there’s a market for an “urban-style” lounge or club that would appeal to people who don’t want to just sit in a bar and, moreover, don’t want to have to schlep to the city to go out.

But I was wrong, and here’s why.  People who live in the suburbs who want to get an urban nightlife experience go to the city.  Whether they are 25 year olds who want to dance and listen to music without words, or 35 year olds who want to go to drink complicated drinks and sit on couches, they all have something in common — they want to do it IN the city. That’s the whole point.  They want to escape the suburbs for a night and feed on the urban energy and excitement.

Hence — the “bridge and tunnel” crowd that everyone in the city complains about when they go to clubs and lounge.  Oh, boy, there’s nothing worse for the reputation of a club/lounge than to get tagged as a “B&T” place, because then no one who actually lives in the city wants to go.  So the urbanites stop coming, and eventually the B&T people realize that they’re schlepping 45 minutes and paying $50 for parking to hang out with people from their neighborhod, so they stop coming. And then the place shuts down, while the B&T people start chasing wherever the urbanites went to.  It’s a vicious circle.

And that’s the point.  The people in the suburbs don’t really care about the music, or the muddled drinks, or the couches — what they want is the feeling of being a part of the urban excitement for a night.  If someone actually opened a hipster club/lounge/whatever in the suburbs, it would be the absolute worst.  By definition, EVERYONE in the place would part of the B&T crowd, except that they wouldn’t actually have to cross a bridge or burrow through a tunnel to get there.  Even worse, the people most likely to end up filling the place would be the very B&T people who aren’t even urbanized enough to want that hit off the urban pipe.  They’d be like the junior varsity to the B&T crowd, people who don’t even care about getting that authentic vibe.  In other words, that suburban hipster lounge would be like the worst place on earth for an urban exile.

That’s why those places don’t exist.  And that’s why my nightlife over the past three years has narrowed down to the occasional trip into the city, or game night at the condo.  In other words, despite any ambitions I might have had to maintain any kind of urban cred, I’m a typical suburbanite.

Ouchy.

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

Our First Suburban New Year’s Eve: Home with Hives

January 3, 2010 by

I used to hate New Year’s Eve in the city.  So do most people who actually live in the city, because it’s like the worst night of the year to go out.  The big cliche, of course, is that it’s “Amateur Night,” precisely because everyone who doesn’t normally go out decides that it’s their night to hit the city’s bars, clubs, and restaurants. (Of course, to the true urban sophisticates, a group that never included me, every weekend night is sort of an “Amateur Night,” because professional partying urbanites go out on weeknights to do things like see a particular DJ, a taste I never actually acquired).

I don’t hate New Year’s Eve because it’s Amateur Night, I hate it because it’s an artificial experience:

  • Restaurants Suck.  None of the good restaurants put out their normal menu, instead offering a “Special New Year’s Eve Prefixe!” that has like three dishes, is twice the normal price, and requires you to either eat early and skeedaddle for the late service or eat late and be sitting in a stupid restaurant when the ball drops, so you can’t see Dick Clark, bless his heart, mumble through the countdown.
  • Clubs Suck.  All the clubs ratchet up their cover charge, require you to buy multiple bottles if you actually want to sit down, and justify the increased costs because they give you a noisemaker they got for 10 cents at Ricky’s.
  • Cabs Suck.  Forget trying to get a cab on New Year’s Eve anytime after 8PM and before 4AM. Not only is the demand too high, but it seems like a whole lot of them go “off duty” all night in an attempt to get desperate women in torturous heels to pay a blackmail off-meter price.
  • Traffic Sucks.  Even if you do get a cab, or have your own car, good luck getting around the city with the bottleneck created by the monstrous Times Square celebration, where people inexplicably line up for hours so they can stand in the cold and not drink so that they can witness a big ball drop for about 60 seconds.

The whole thing is a disaster.  That’s why virtually every New Year’s Eve for the past five years or so, we had our own party, usually a nice dinner party for close friends where we’d opt out of the whole city experience, have a great meal, talk to each other in ways that you can’t if you go to any ear-blistering club, watch Dick Clark at midnight, and go to bed by 2AM or so.  Always a great night, made better for me at least by the fact that I could spend the whole night without venturing outside my front door.

That said, of course, now that we’re suburanites, we had every intention of going into the city for New Year’s Eve, because, well, we’re now EXACTLY THE SORT OF PEOPLE WHO RUIN NEW YEAR’S EVE FOR THE CITY PEOPLE!  We were looking forward to being outer-borough amateurs running around the city and making asses of ourselves.  We were going to meet up with our city friends at some swank club, overpay for drinks all night, and collapse in a ridiculously expensive hotel room for the night. Essentially, we were eager to ruin it for the rest of you.

Sadly, the Gods punished us for our heresy.  New Year’s Eve day (is that the right way to say it?), my wife comes down with some sort of allergic reaction, gets these weird hives that she never had before, and can’t go out.  We tell our friends to take our hotel room, which may be the nicest thing we’ve ever done for anyone ever, and hang out on the couch all night.

So that was our first New Year’s Eve in the suburbs: home, alone, watching TV and in bed by 12:30.  Yeeeesh.  We’re becoming suburbanites faster than I thought…….

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