Happy Summer 2022. We made it fam. Another year, another hot-vax summer living in a full-blown, wide-scale pandemic and going from touch-me-and-I’ll-kill-you to:

WE OUTSIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII !!!!!!!!!!!! *Cue the four-wheelers, popping wheelies on broadway*

I find the resilience humans have, adapting to tragedy absolutely amazing. It doesn’t matter what happens, we continue on as a society and I don’t know if it’s straight-up biology or if we’ve become sheep-ish in the sense where we just do, just to do because we’re all afraid living in a chaotic and de-constructed society. I’m going to pause and let you think about that one. Moving on….

I finally moved. Fam, I found an apartment across the river and betrayed my native New Yorkers. I moved to Jersey. Real talk: am I going to lose my NYC cred’? Now that my day-to-day frustrations don’t revolve around the commute, the subway, the mass of people, the smell, the rent, the shitty men on dating apps, the post-9/11 PTSD and the swamp-butt summers, can I still mingle with my New York peeps with the same weight of cynicism and mutual repugnance?

*Author’s note: I forgot to mention the pee-garbage snow that sadly resembles an Italian icee from your worst nightmare.

Whoa. I don’t know the answer to that question. What a rude awakening. It’s like Neo taking the red pill and waking up in a field of flowers instead of a robot fetus in the anti-Matrix reboot: The Robots are Maaaaaaad Nyce. With the exception of Wall-E and Disney-Pixar magic, nobody wants to see a movie where robots are dumb and nice to the humans. We want to see smart-ass robots DESTROY and feed on humans. Why? Because we’re brilliant and fucking stupid at the same time. Why? Because balance. The engineers of life will always create an antagonist, for balance. I’m pretty sure the human birthrate is a 1:3, genius: dodo ratio. I mean how else can you explain the brilliance of going into space, documenting a 3-D universe and still hear a bunch of people go “Nahhhh, da earth is FLAT”.

I’m just going to come out and say it. I think people move or continue to live in New York Shitty to suffer, complain and get street cred’. Not from any kind of streets, okay? New York Shitty (can’t stop-won’t stop) streets. Am I right or amiright? let’s be real: only 5% of New Yorkers actually enjoy the Shitty (did it again), the rest of us live in it. Do you think people really move here because of the “energy” and the “realness”? People move here because whatever butt-crack town they’re from is boring and mundane. They don’t want to see Tommy mowing his lawn, which he already did yesterday and they day before that, precisely at 9am. They want to see a rat put a pigeon in a choke hold with its bare teeth for the THRILL. Am I right or amiright?

All jokes aside, I really, truly do love New York. I’m daughter of the concrete- born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen. Even though my childhood was pretty sheltered, living in one of the few section- 8 buildings in a predominantly wealthy neighborhood, I’m grateful for living in midtown and being able to explore all parts of the city from a mid-point. Not sure if I’ll move back but I think I hit the sweet spot. I have all the Manhattan amenities without the price-point and rat-race burnout. I moved to a town so close to the city, I can live tax-free, see a few more trees and still be ready to move right back in case I have a nervous breakdown from the extra oxygen.

When I say, “I love my apartment”, it doesn’t do it any justice because I feel that it implies that it’s perfect, in the it-has-everything-sort-of-way because it doesn’t. My apartment is kooky AF. There’s a barn door in the living room, my kitchen looks like it was sliced diagonally by a samurai, the front door to the apartment is at the bottom of the staircase, which leads to this U-shaped entryway, lined by the railing that barely reaches my hips and I’m constantly imagining myself tripping and falling backwards, over the stairs, falling all the way down, getting paralyzed and watching my cat put her butt against my eye, so I can scratch the spot she likes because her dumb ass doesn’t realized I am crippled.

I’m still adjusting but I think the move was the best decision I’ve made in three years. Having full autonomy of my space and life feels like I placed a flag on the Shithithtefan Mountain, after climbing, slipping, soaring, falling and resting for three years. It’s not perfect. I unfortunately still go through periods of depression but I’m in a safe space to deal with it. I don’t think I’ll ever be “cured” from depression and to be honest, I don’t want to be. I believe I’m meant to feel emotions as deeply as I do. That’s what makes me an artist and I will never take that gift for granted. The engineers of my life added depression to counter my elation and without the two, I would be blind.