always interesting to learn what other people think about you.

“Dangerous?” I’m not dangerous. At least, I never have been until now. I’m harmless, in every way. At least, I think I am.

That before I was sad last night, I was happy. Very happy, in fact. The sadness hit me once I was alone and thinking about myself and my life. The sadness hit me when I was sitting in a Sbarro downtown at 3:00 in the morning doing nothing in particular.

I don’t know how I feel about those intense nights that combine everything that’s best about being with other people with everything that’s worst about being a lonely American. I guess I just have to fix the lonely American think.

But it was intense. That’s for sure.

has for the most part worn off. It began sometime as I was walking back from a kind of Hallowe’en-plus-going-away party for the friend of a friend, leaving (I presume) for Germany. What began as a crowded evening in front of a coffee shop in the village combined with the throngs of devils and superheroes to become raucous street revelry complete with drumming and dancing.

Such moments, in which you can see the ways in which many people are the same, also serve to show you the ways in which you are different. And (as was discussed in the most banal fashion in a recent class), such differences are real, though it’s culturally uncouth to say that here in the U.S. for some reason.

We’re not all the same. In fact, we are all quite different… and it is difficult to try to transition from one culture to the next in any way, whether the transition is temporary and instantaneous or much more gradual and permanent. It gives me a deep appreciation for my dad’s perseverance and what must be the truly amazing reservoir of openness and optimism in him, something that I never credited to my father before. He came from a different (and in many ways opposite) culture and geography as a young man and stayed in the U.S., took a western wife, learned to appreciate and enjoy television and pizza, basketball and pop music, and (more or less) happily raised children with green mowhawks and clubbing addictions.

Would I have been—or would I be—able to do the same in order to seize some kind of happiness? Do I have such a measure of faith and trust in me? I’m not so sure.

And in knowing that, I also know that I unless things change, I have lost—lost the entire game. And the time for making changes is running out. I have to figure out how to reach out and take happiness before I’ve missed my chance.

—

After the cafe, after the village, after the dancing and yelling, when it was time to go (happily I am at least aware enough to know when it is time to go—the anthropologist in me isn’t completely suppressed by the American in me), I took to the streets and walked north on Sixth Avenue through an endless jungle of garbage and drunken revelers to Times Square, radically alone the entire way and maybe more “in New York” than I’ve been since I got here.

I bit my lip, sighed, and got on the 1 train, knowing again more about myself than I’m really happy to know, and enough about others to develop a certain longing for something that I may never manage to touch.

I amend the previous statement, actually. I have touched it… but of course, having touched, one always wants more, whether or not one can (realistically, with self-awareness) reasonably expect to have it—ever.

—

I have ultimately to leave this nation—the only one I have ever really known—behind. In doing so, I will also be much farther away from my family and friends. That makes me deeply sad. But it is also the only way I will ever be happy.

New York is okay, but it’s just lacking something in comparison. Chicago is taller, deeper, more nuanced, full of more flavor. It’s a city with an old soul and more impressively massive architecture. I think there’s a good chance that Chicago is where I will ultimately end up living, but of course at this point that’s all just talk. But I do somehow today miss the “downtown” of Chicago, which was (thanks to its amazing vertical scale) somehow more edifying than New York which isn’t (after all) nearly as full of skyscrapers and impressive avenues.

I’m really quite extraordinarily sad tonight. I wish I could say I didn’t know why, but I do know why. The impact itself feels sudden, though I think the sadness has been building for a few days. Sometimes you can’t have what you want. Sometimes you don’t want what you want, and it leads to a kind of desperate longing combined with regret at who you are.

I suppose here begins hard stretch #1 in NYC.

It comes so easily to some people. They are just alive, naturally, without having to work at it at all. Then there are those of us that have to try very hard to live—I don’t mean like hardship, I just mean it doesn’t come naturally to “be alive” and we want to so we have to work at it—and we often still don’t get it right.

But it’s good to try.