Our Next Move

We’ve decided to move to Austin, Texas at the end of this year. While it may seem to an outsider that I’m falling in to Roger’s master plan (to have the entire family live within a block from each other for all eternity), this is not so.

Maggie is finished with school in December, and will be able to take her boards a couple of months after she graduates (and then will finally be able to write you all those prescriptions you’ve been asking about). I’m planning (again) on attending grad school in a not-yet-determined location (so far the possibilities include Madison, Minneapolis, Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle), next fall. We’re both tired of our jobs, and ready for a change, so we’ve decided to grab the opportunity to live in a different part of the country while we’re still young and reckless, even if it may end up moving again in less than a year. We’ve gone back and forth about doing this for months, and we’re finally pushing all of our chips in; we’re going.


If we were to base this decision just on finances, it’d be hard to leave since both of us make a pretty good living here, and the money we’ll make elsewhere is currently unknown. But it’s not all about money. You give up a lot to live in Manhattan, and there’s more to living than the interest my savings account earns. While some outsiders envy the position I’m in and think living here must be just like the movies, until you’ve actually tried here, you have no idea what it’s really like.

There are multiple perspectives on this issue:

For the native New Yorker, this is how the world is. The lack of personal space, the blowing garbage, the heroin-addicted schizophrenic bums who are “down on their luck, and just need a 15 cents”, the constant noise, the inflated costs: all normal. What on earth can anywhere else offer, that New York can’t?

There are parts of this city that I really do like. I will miss the overload of restaurant choices, the variety of cultures, the mariachi bands on the subway, overhearing ridiculous conversations, the tell-it-like-it-is attitude of most of the people here, and the dense history of this city.

But it’s time to call in my debt, and reclaim the things I gave up when moving here:

A car. It doesn’t even have to be as fancy as Natasha. It just needs to move, and I need to have the keys. I don’t want to feel bound to wherever public transport will take me.

An spacious apartment that can be cleaned. The apartment I currently live in is considered “big”, “really nice”, and “cheap” by the new york people who have visited it. Compared to the apartments offered in any other part of the country, this apartment would be considered “A minuscule, overpriced, awkwardly-shaped sweatbox, with permanently affixed dirt in parts, with an underground cockroach infestation that enjoys visiting the surface on extremely hot days.”

An accessible drum set. While the by-the-hour place on 30th street is ok, it’s not my set. My set has not recently been beaten by a drum stick wielding group of monkeys. The sets I play on have.

My personal-space-bubble. Honestly, I think the most annoying part of living here is all the other people living here, too. Sometimes you just want to get some skittles at the grocery store, and don’t want to deal with the nightmarish number of people squeezing themselves through the narrow aisles. While this city may offer you infinite opportunities to see obscure bands, the problem is that there are a million other people wanting to see that same band, so good luck.

Ubiquitous Air Conditioning. New York is not the hottest place in the US, but there are not many other places in the US that you’re forced to stand in it for extended periods of time. It’s unfortunate that I’m such a good sweater. As I like to say, “I am a time traveler: The sweat you will experience after standing here for 20 minutes, I am experiencing now.” Even though Austin is hotter, it seems like a dream to step out from an air conditioned house, into an air conditioned car, and then into an air conditioned building, rather than my current reality of stepping out of a stuffy apartment, onto a hot street, and into an even hotter subway station.

Aside from the rare native new yorker, these desires are pretty common. There are some local solutions, I suppose. If you’re a high roller, you can buy most of these luxuries, and if you’re not, you can probably get them by moving out of Manhattan. If I really had to stay here longer, moving to Hoboken or Brooklyn would be an option I would definitely explore.

To illustrate the inflated New York tax, and even higher Manhattan tax, consider my experience with getting a quote for a Penske moving truck. Cost of a truck from Manhattan to Austin: $1700. Cost of a truck from Brooklyn (mere minutes away from where I live) to Austin: $1200. $500 difference? Seriously? And then the kicker. Cost of a moving truck from Austin to NYC: $450. I suppose it’s all supply and demand, and Manhattan, as the most densely populated area in the US, is on the shitty end of that relationship. Recently, the Brian Lehner radio show asked their listeners to find out what a 6-pack of Budweiser cost in their neighborhood, and the results were pretty interesting. There are a few anomalies in there, but as we figured out soon after we moved here, things in usually Manhattan cost much more than things outside of Manhattan.

Anyway, moving on, most of the people I know here have a love/hate relationship with this city. Before living here, I hated the city purely on the hype that surrounded it, and living here has thankfully given me realistic look at both sides. For some people, the sacrifices are worth it. There are things that this city is really great for, but for me, living is not one of them.

So we’re leaving in December. Two of our friends here are making the same move, so we’ll have an social island away from the family-friend-circle, which I think is a very, very good thing. We’ll live with my cousin for a month or two while we buy a car, look for jobs, and Maggie studies for her boards. Andrew’s house is 5 times the size of our apartment, so from our perspective right now it should be pretty cushy. Of course, I’m sure the reality of the situation will set in about a month in, which is why we’re not planning on staying with him much longer than that. I should find out what grad schools I get into by March, and then we’ll start deciding where we’re moving next. If I got into the University of Texas and we really like Austin, we might just end up staying there.

On the other hand, if I decide to go to grad school elsewhere, we could end up moving again as soon as June. Who would force themselves to move twice in less than a year? Idiots? That’s what I’m still having a hard time figuring out.

It’s going to be a busy few months, let me tell you. I’m re-taking that fabulous GRE test again in preparation for all this school-applying, and this time I’m actually putting some effort into preparing for it. I’ve looked at so many test questions and studied so many question types, I’m starting to like this test. That’s kind of scary. I’m taking a grad class at Columbia this semester, which as usual is taking up a lot of my time. And my pretty relaxed job is becoming more busy due the feeling that I need to ‘wrap things up before I leave’.

It’ll all pass, though, and before I know it I’ll be driving a Penske truck through a snowstorm again, like I did almost exactly 2 years earlier.