A decade in New York makes you a New Yorker

It also gives you impatience, a suspicious stance, a fondness for things that can be delivered to your doorstep and, thus, an utter inability to live elsewhere.


New York spoils you. It offers so much, usually at once, that you get used to turn things away. Sometimes those things are people. Other times they are fabulous restaurants, hot openings, fancy stores, new books, happening parties. There will always be another just around a corner, something just as good or better. Someone more interesting, more original.


I was too tired to go see Björk the other night. I had tickets, I really like Björk, the concert was a ten-minute cab ride away, there was nothing wrong with me. I just felt like staying home instead. This can't be normal.


A New Yorker is picky/discerning, lazy/comfortable and ultimately sort of forever young. We live in apartments most people in other cities would deem inhabitable or at least not appropriate for adults, often with roommates, and some of us (me) never use our tiny kitchens to cook (I store all kinds of things in my cabinets, very few are related to food). We still go out five times a week when we're 35, we wait as long as possible to have children if we do at all and some of us act like we're 20 eternally.


Most restaurants in New York deliver food to your home and it's not even expensive. I think this is partly to blame. It's too easy to get a meal cooked according to your wishes and handed to you, while you're not even bothered to get dressed so you open the door wrapped in a coat you found nearby and tip the delivery guy heftily just so he'll stop smirking at the sight of you- all you have to do is hand over some hard cash. They even give you a paper plate and plastic utensils, because they know you don't have any clean ones. This too must be abnormal.


Here, more than anywhere else, I think, cash is king. If you have money in New York, and you don't have to be rich, just not broke, you can live like one. Everything is at your fingertips, just moments away, everything can be done for you.


I haven't done my own laundry in over a decade because it's handed to me perfectly washed, dried and folded for a few dollars. They even wash the laundry bag. It's like getting a bikini wax, after the initial embarrassment and cognitive dissonance surrounding class differences and intimacy, "Is any part of this even ok??", even a Swede relaxes and just goes with it. Especially this Swede.


I just ordered my dinner between those last two paragraphs. Steak salad, from Café Angelina. It's perfect; crispy lettuce, purple onions, cherry tomatoes, peppery pieces of steak. And it will be here in 20 minutes. I'd better put some pants on.