Well, I'm less than 48 hours from my official move from New York to Los Angeles to begin my two-year journey at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. It’s a pretty big change for this guy. I’ve been living in New York for almost exactly ten years now (four for college and six as an “adult”).
But this past decade doesn’t really begin to explain my affinity for New York. It started far earlier. My parents grew up in New York, and even though I was born and raised in Florida, we went north to the city a few times a year. Broadway shows. Museums. Mets games (don’t get me started). It was my second home. And when I got into Columbia University, it really became my primary home. My folks would rib me that it never seemed like I wanted to return to Clearwater to visit them. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them – I just had little desire to return to the land of the early bird special when New York was so great. Florida, I would tell them, was where old people go to die. It’s ingrained in them the same way homing pigeons know how to travel. That’s why your grandparents live there. Admit it. They do. Plus, my parents came up to New York a lot during my college years. So much, in fact, my sophomore year roommate saw them more often than his own folks, and he lived an hour’s drive from Manhattan.
Needless to say, it’s been really strange packing up not for a move to a new apartment across town, but for a trip clear across the country to a city I never imagined calling home. I admit it, I’m a New York snob. I think it’s the greatest city in the world. Even if I take to Los Angeles, I will probably never admit that it stands up to New York. I’m that delusional about this town and simply that stubborn. I thought I’d never leave. However, when it came time to evaluate my future, Los Angeles just made sense. I’m a media and entertainment maven and LA is at the epicenter of the field. I already have New York contacts, so why not make some left coast inroads? And quite frankly, if I stayed in New York, it just felt like my life wouldn’t change all that much. I wouldn’t be fully testing my mettle. There’d be no inner challenge.
And that’s what I need right now. I want to challenge myself. I want to learn about facets of the biz I’ve never encountered before. I want to meet a new and diverse group of people to call friends and colleagues. I want to enjoy In N Out Burger. I want to embrace perennially gorgeous weather. But most of all, I want to determine if Los Angeles is really like how it’s depicted in Swingers or Entourage. Because if things turn out even remotely similar to Mikey or Turtle for this transplant, maybe leaving New York isn’t going to be so bad. See you next time in Westwood.
