Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: The Pressure is Off!

October 3, 2012 by

One of the great things about living in the suburbs is that the pressure is off.  What pressure?  That unrelentingly guilty feeling that you’re always missing out on something, that you should be going to more concerts and theater and museums and clubs, and bars, and hot new restaurants.  That nagging voice in your head saying that if you’re living in the city you should be taking advantage of living in the city:

What?  You’re going to stay home and watch The Voice? What’s wrong with you?  Artcat just posted that a series of Sara Swaty portraits exploring gender identity and the body is opening this weekend at the Leslie-Lohman Museum!  The 37th Annual Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival is in previews on Theater Row!  And you’re going to watch TV?  What a plebian! What a vulgarian!

Sometimes, living in Manhattan can be mentally exhausting.  There’s just TOO MUCH to do, too many choices, too many decisions to make, and you’ll never get to everything.  Even if you go out every night, you’ll never even scrape the surface of all the shows you should be seeing, art you should be appreciating, food you should be trying.  Think of it this way — New York City has 24,000 restaurants.  Even if you eliminate the half of them that are the various warring Ray’s Pizza chains, that’s still 12,000 places to eat.  365 days a year, 3 meals a day, it would take you almost 12 years to try them all.  That’s a lot of miso-glazed cod.

Another example: right now, at this moment, there are about 25 shows playing on Broadway, and almost 60 off-broadway.  That’s 85 shows.  Go see one a day, and you might get through them in three months, at which time about a third of those shows will have closed and been replaced.  And that’s not even counting off-off-broadway.

It’s a cultural treadmill, and the guilt trip never ends.  Just pick up a copy of the Times, and you’ll see pictures of society events you never have the time to go to, reviews of restaurants you’ll never try, profiles of bands you’ll never hear.  And, even worse, it seems like EVERYONE ELSE is somehow finding the time to get more out of the city than you ever will.  You finally get out to a club, only to be told that you REALLY should go there on Tuesday nights.  Tuesday nights?  People go out Tuesday nights?  Seriously?  What do they do all day?

That’s what’s nice about the suburbs.  Yes, like everyone says, there’s not a lot to do.  But in a lot of ways, that’s a blessing.  Fewer choices, fewer decisions, easier to focus.  Rather than trying to stay afloat in an unrelenting cultural stream, you have to actually seek out opportunities for interesting theater, art openings, new restaurants.  They’re out there – even in the suburbs, there are some good restaurants and galleries and concert halls. Not as many, of course, but that’s the point.  Because the choices are fewer and further between, you don’t have that pressure to ALWAYS BE DOING SOMETHING.

So you get to give yourself a break.  It’s not your fault.  You’re living in the boring old suburbs!  So what else are you going to do but sit on your couch, put your feet up, and guiltlessly watch some lowbrow reality tv?

Filed Under: Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, Reasons You'll Love Living in the Suburbs Tagged With: , , , ,

How Do You Buy Fancy Art When You Know Nothing About Art?

September 25, 2010 by

As I’ve said before, I know nothing about art.  Seriously. I can name maybe like five famous artists, all of them long dead, and mostly what I know is that one of them cut his ear off or something, which I have to say is pretty badass.  I know that there’s something called “cubism” and something else called “impressionism,” and have a general sense that it’s not really art if it’s painted on velvet.

That said, as part of this whole growing up process that I’m going through, with the whole move to the suburbs and all, I’ve started to become more interesting in getting pretty things to put on my walls. I have a lot more walls than I used to have, so I need to cover them with something, and I’m a little past the age when I can get by with the same cheap prints I’ve been lugging around since college.

So in the same way that we committed to having an actual professional help decorate our home, we’ve actually found someone to help us buy real art to fill up those walls. We met this lovely woman named Heather Flow who happens to be a private art buyer — someone who advises you about buying art, and collects a commission when you buy something, a fee that, just like with interior decorators, is supposed to be offset by what you can save buying through her.

It seems absolutely crazy that I actually have an “art buyer.”  Even writing the words makes me feel a little squishy.  But as hopeless as I was with interior design, I was practically [editor note: insert name of famous interior designer] compared to my capacity for buying art.  So she has been absolutely indispensible.

And it kind of turns out to be a fun and interesting process. She took us out to look at a lot of galleries, places that in all the years I lived in Manhattan I never visited.  Apparently, that’s where they sell the art.  Who knew?   I never actually went to those places, partly because I didn’t have money to buy any real art and partly because I was little intimidated by the whole concept, sure that I’d be immediately dismissed by some snooty gallery wisp in that whole “if you have to ask you can’t afford it” way.

So she arranges for us to go visit, asks us what we like and don’t like, and has helped narrow down our tastes to guide us to something that won’t embarrass us when it’s hanging on our walls.  So we’ve come to realize that we like abstract art, don’t like things like videos of eyeballs (which was one of the options, apparently), and like a lot of color.  Again, who knew?

By no means are we jumping into this with any type of real budget. I get the sense that Heather has far more sophisticated clients in far higher price ranges.  But even at our relatively modest level, we’ve had some interesting experiences.

The best part is that the gallery owners don’t know what pikers we really are, because we’re with Heather, so they don’t treat us like some slobs when we come through the gallery.  For all they know, we’re internet millionaires or something. And, to be fair, the idea that gallery owners treat people like slobs is almost certainly something a fiction I’ve created inside my own head, not an actual reflection of reality. They certainly seem like nice people.

 And we’ve even started looking on our own — and in the suburbs, no less.  A few weeks ago, we went over to Armonk, in Westchester County, for the Armonk Outdoor Art Show.  The show is part of a circuit that various types of artists hit during the year, setting up booths to display their stuff.  So now that we had a little bit of edumacation from Heather about what to look for, we actually had a good time hitting up the booths and actually, amazingly, appreciating the art.
So let’s just chalk one up for the kid, shall we?  All these years of living in Manhattan, and now that he’s living in the suburbs, he’s finally developing an appreciation for art.
Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, SUMA Lifestyle Tagged With: , ,

What I Won’t Miss About the City: The Pressure to Go Better Myself

August 23, 2010 by

I’ve tried to be cultured, I really have.  When you live in the greatest city in the world, you feel almost a compulsion to do add a little refinement in your life.  The feeling just nags at you: what are you doing living here if you’re just going to sit at home watching “The Office”?

So even if you don’t like opera, you try to go once in a while, even though opera is absolutely HORRIBLE.  It really is. I’m sorry, I know that it’s really great and all that, and I’m a terrible person because I don’t appreciate it enough, or really at all.  But to me it’s a lot of not-such-great acting and singing in that wierd voice that doesn’t sound all that human in a language that I don’t speak.  I pretty much only speak English.  Not a lot of opera in English.

And you also have to go to galleries and museums and all that.  I tried to do that, joined the Apollo Circle at the Met — okay, let’s be honest that it was my WIFE who joined and brought me along — which was fun because we got to go to parties and stuff.  And I like looking at art a lot better than sitting through opera, although I know almost nothing and, at this point in my life, don’t have the time to learn.  But I like me the pretty paintings.

The problem is that there’s just so much pressure when you live in the city to do those types of things, a built-in guilt trip every time you pass the Moma or the Guggenheim and realize that you haven’t actually walked inside in like five years. I’m sure a lot of people who live in the city have done a better job than me at all that stuff, and I tip my (baseball) cap to them.  But I’ll bet a lot of other people are more like me — more  in love with the IDEA of being in such a cultured city, but less in love with the actual, you know, going out and doing stuff.

So while I miss the energy and excitement of the city, I don’t really miss that guilt trip.  Now, I have an excuse as to why I haven’t been inside a museum in five years, or haven’t gone to an opera in as long as I can remember.  I live in the suburbs, after all!  So much less is expected of me now. No more guilt. No more pressure.  Sort of the silver lining in the cultural wasteland that is becoming my life.

So that’s one good thing about living in the suburbs — no one expects that you ever do anything cultured and refine.  So you don’t have to.

Off to the couch.  Law and Order is almost certainly on.

 

Filed Under: Best of, Humor, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,