Toto, I think we're in New York.

I've lived in New York my whole life. I grew up in a town that is famous for their buses having a מחיצה down the middle. That alone should explain why I dislike it so much and moved out. I now live in NYC - which is famous for a lot of other reasons, but is definitely not known for having friendly people. That's why whenever people ask me where I'm from, and they think I'm from "out of town", or somewhere outside the NY metropolitan area, like Detroit, I take it as a very high compliment. It means they think I'm a nice person. So thank you for that.

I never really thought of myself as one of those cocky NY-centric geographically inept people who typically lives here and thinks that NY is the center of the Universe and everywhere else is just a suburb.....like Pennsyltucky, or Ohidaho, or New Jersey. However, after this past shabbat, I might have trouble proving that.

I went to Philadelphia - in Pennsylvania, but not the capital - see? I know stuff! I went there for a aufruf and a wedding. The whole weekend was amazing....soooo glad I went...with my ducks....which all quack....a lot. Besides the ducks, there were a lot of people who came in from Chicago for the weekend also. So as a nice friendly non-NY-ish gesture, I wanted to welcome them after they traveled from far. So I said to them on Friday, "Welcome to NY" to which they replied, "Um...we're not in NY", afterwhich I felt really dumb. I knew we weren't in NY. I had just spent 2 hours in a car traveling there. And when we got there, there were trees. So of course we were not in NY. NY doesn't have those big "tree" things. We don't even know what trees are. But they are a lot prettier than the tall ugly buildings I see from my windows.
The rest of the weekend, it just became the big joke that I'm from NY and that NY is the center of the universe and nowhere else matters. So I began calling everyone out-of-towners - which was ironically true b/c most of the ppl there were actually not from Philly either. So really, we were all out-of-towners - except for me, of course, being from NY, the center of the Universe.
At the שבת כלה, in the afternoon, one of the women gave a really awesome דבר תורה explaining the phases of the moon and how witnesses used to report when ראש חדש was coming. She even had a demonstration involving paper cut-outs of the sun, the earth, and the different phases of the moon. It was sooo cool! When she put the Earth on the table with the sun, she showed how our angle is going to be from Antarctica. I quickly jumped up and asked, "Wait, where's NY?"

So I just want to set the record straight. In my defense, I really don't believe that New York is the center of the universe. I actually don't like New York so much. (altho Toys R Us on 42nd street is reeeeally cool! They have a ferris wheel in the store!) I hate Monsey and I totally hate Brooklyn. Western NY State, like up by the finger lakes is beautiful and more like the rest of the US in terms of it's actually really nice there with friendly ppl and stuff. But I'm sort of (not at all) like an abused child who still loves the abusive parents. The child doesn't know any different. So too, I've lived in NY my whole life and therefore I don't know any better. That's not really my fault.....right?


p.s. See Josh, I didn't mention my birthday once in this whole post.