10 Reasons to Hate New York

     

WARNING: This article may cause some annoyance amongst Nuokers. Only the thick-skinned should continue.

You’re lying on your bed in the small, provincial town of L., staring up at the comprehensive map of the world splayed across your wall. With the laser-pointer someone gave you as a present for your 15th birthday, you’re wondering where on earth you can seek refuge from the dull, no-one-understands-me-in-this-town banalities that plague your everyday existence.

The red beam from your pointer shoots across a multitude of topographies painted in garish colors that only live on maps: lakes, forests, oceans, megalopolises. Pyongyang? Too militaristic. Moscow? Too expensive. Nouakchott? Next.

Then, the red beam, pulled by some unearthly power, slowly bends towards the United States. It tracks down the eastern seaboard bypassing a series of names that don’t mean that much to you (“What’s a Massachussetts?”).

Finally, as if instructed by divine will, the pointer settles on a city whose notoriety, legend and public appeal have transformed it into a destination of mythic proportions. A Babylon, Jerusalem, Rome and Atlantis all rolled into one. What’s the name of that city? (Say it in chorus) NEW YORK!

Well, I hate to burst your bubble. But here are ten good reasons why you should keep that red pointer moving across your map:

1 – The Smear

In the two years it has been around The Smear has achieved a sort of cult landmark status. But, honestly folks, the fact that The Smear (of s__t, that is) has been allowed to survive for two years on the side of a building on 30th between 7th and 8th is reason enough to hate New York.

2 – The Prices

$15 cocktails and $8 beers; $2 espressos; $2,500/month studio apartments (on Roosevelt Island!!); the $26 burger; and $20,000/year tuition to send your kid to a decent elementary school. As Jerry Seinfeld once said: “Do these people have any idea what the prices are every place else in the world?”

Frommeru2019s NYC Free... Ethan Wolff Best Price: $0.48 (as of 04:30 UTC - Details)

3 – No Sex in the City

Women: the majority of men in NY are gay.

Men: you can’t afford the majority of women.

4 – The Subway

A haven to the homeless, rats and roaches, mysterious liquids cascading off the platform in fetid waterfalls and swirling onto the tracks below, an incomprehensible PA system, people eating weird, smelly foods out of white Styrofoam boxes, dull advertising for crappy colleges, interminable delays, and the general sense the subway stations’ rotten and rusty girders will collapse under their own weight at any time make the New York subway another reason to hate the Big Apple.

5 – The Weather

You could decide to go somewhere mild, sunny, with a delicate sea breeze, perhaps somewhere in the tropics Micronesia, the Caribbean, the Maldives (before they sink). Instead, you decide to come to New York, where it’s freezing in the winter, unbearable in the summer, and rains all the time in between. As the glacial wind cuts at your face in mid-February (after all, NY is windier than The Windy City) you’ll have another reason to hate NY.

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June 24, 2010