Wizarding World of Harry Potter was ah-mazing, and the vacation in general was pretty awesome. Jorge and I sort of winged it and managed to get in a lot of family time and a lot of driving and eating. There were some bad times, like when I suddenly couldn’t see the highway because of foggy rain and freaked out or when Jorge got a ticket from the MTA. But overall, good times. It’s weird that the older I get the more I like getting to know family members better. My family isn’t really close at all and never has been.

Being in Florida also made me realize how ridiculously hard it is to live in the city. Not that I haven’t been to suburbia before, but in Florida if you can manage to have a decent job, you can also have a huge house and a huge kitchen and everything you need to live is a lot cheaper so you can live comparatively luxuriously on a salary that would get you a tiny apartment in a crap neighborhood here. My salary spent there would afford me a far better lifestyle, and it was so abundantly clear to me while I was there. But my job only exists here or a handful of other expensive, less glamorous cities, so that leaves me and whatever future family I have sort of trapped indefinitely. It’s probably vacation goggles, but I can’t help wondering if maybe people living elsewhere are right. Switch careers, live better.

And it didn’t help that my morning commute took twice as long as usual this morning due to broken trains. At one stop a woman barged off the train through the oncoming crowd screaming “MOVE, GOD DAMN IT! FUCK!” and crying like she’d been stabbed. The MTA broke her brain. And when I arrived at work, it was to find my favorite coworker had quit while I was away.

It’s hard to see the upside of New York City right now, but I guess it’ll get better eventually.