Day: June 8, 2013

I’ve always found it strange that so many New Yorkers call Phoenix home. Sure, they’re both cities, but the title appeared to be where the similarities ended. Sitting above 24th street in New York on an abandoned railroad turned park, I decided to give the connection a bit closer consideration.

For starters, the lifestyle between NYC and PHX could hardly be more different. PHX is a horizontal community more prone to urban sprawl than proper use of space. New York is vertical. There are almost no buildings on manhattan island shorter than three stories. Thanks to the clearly defined borders of the island, the real estate magnates were forced to build up. Building up is not part of the plan in Phoenix. In fact, building up is regulated by law. In most suburbs you are not allowed to crest two stories let alone three. Of course, this is a bit of an unfair comparison in of itself. Manhattan is incomparable to anywhere outside of London proper. Still, Manhattan is what people think of when they think of NYC. It is the home of the World Trade Center ruins, the Empire State Building, and the actual City in Sex in the City.

Phoenix is best known for Scottsdale, a town slightly east and north of Phoenix proper. Scottsdale is known for money and golf courses and the bloody wealthy and frivolous folk presumed to live there. This is no presumption, of course. While there are a fair number of regular folk who call the dale home, there are an equal number–if not more–of folk who require a kickstand for their noses. The same can be said of NYC and anywhere on the westside with a street number below 90.

In the end, I can find some thin similarities in some of the people who live in the city, but the places themselves are so different as to suggest no relationship whatsoever. So, I am left to wonder why people choose to move from one place to the other. Maybe it is the same reason I moved. Maybe everyone wants a really big house.

Some Thoughts:
1. In retrospect, $150 for a three hour reunion seems a bit overpriced. It may not be. We will find out in a few hours.
2. I really do miss NYC. I am a different person here. I am a better person here I think. I am more driven to accomplish things.

I’ve been playing mind games. Not the ‘mess with someone’ variety, but the sharpen your brain variety. Ipads are good for that. I’ve been playing a few like Room and Machinarium, but I am also playing the Hasbro classics Risk and Scrabble. I learned that my brain isn’t as sharp as it was at the ripe old age of 18, but I can still do the complex thinking if I do it in chunks. The key to living as a thinker is thinking. Our society is geared towards limiting our need and opportunity to think, so we as individuals are responsible for taking up the weighty challenge of critical thought. By extending myself to think quite a bit more than I am required to I am undoing a lot of damage and remembering what it feels like to be an intelligent human being.

Don’t get me wrong, what I do as an educator requires intelligence, but what i do daily becomes a pattern and familiar patterns fail to expand and ignite the brain. The key to knowledge is new; expanding the parameters of what your mind is expected to do every day.

Some Thoughts:

1. I struggle to imagine how vast and desolate an abandoned city like Chernobyl must be. Moreover, I am left to wonder how many other abandoned cities we don’t know about.