My Own Sex and the City

I'm still jet-lagged from the trip back to Rome, so instead of sleeping I've been watching borrowed DVD's on my Mac until 4 in the morning. A friend lent me the first two seasons of Sex and the City, which I'd never seen before, and that's what I've started with.

The show made its debut the same year that I moved to New York City, and watching it now is like opening a time capsule. This is pre-9/11, pre-dot-com bust, pre-George Bush (even pre-Monica Lewinsky) New York City. The World Trade Center still dominates the skyline. Jobs paying twenty dollars an hour to do little more than surf the internet all day are still plentiful. Manhattan is a big playground of fusion-cuisine restaurants and smoky bars where every night it seems possible you might meet The One, the man or woman you'd spend the rest of your life with.

Like the characters of Sex and the City, I went from date to date, trying to convince myself that despite each new flaw I'd discover in the latest guy I was seeing, this time things were different, this relationship would last. And though none of them did last, none of them ended my faith in the possibility that the next relationship would be different from the one before.

It was a confusing, heady time with daily miracles and catastrophes. I'd just started grad school and was meeting my writing friends in cafes to exchange our latest short stories, hot from our printers. The most ambitious of us would feverishly submit our work to literary magazines that would send back form rejection letters, occasionally scribbled with a cryptic handwritten "Sorry, but try us again!" Or "Nice work" and then an illegible signature as if to say, "Here's a compliment, but don't dare try to use this to establish a relationship with a real person on our staff."

Politics hardly seemed to matter. Certainly they mattered less than the brilliant screenplays we were going to write, the important sculptures we were going to create, the torrent of culture and cuisine we felt it was our duty to consume and comment on.

Back then, the one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted to leave New York as soon as I could. I hated the crowded sidewalks, the lines, the extravagant prices, the snobby bar scene, the stupid parties where you were expected to hold court with a drink in your hand and utter clever bon mots. I used to wander through Riverside Park, trying to find a corner where I'd be surrounded by trees and nothing and no one else. There I'd dream of living in a quiet, civilized college town with my own car and cheap, massive grocery stores with parking lots.

Where would I go? How would I earn a living? Who would I fall in love with? When would I be published? I was so consumed with trying to find the answers to these questions as quickly as possible that I completely missed that I was living in an enchanted fairyland. Many of the literary magazines I used to get rejection letters from have folded because no one reads anymore. The dot-com jobs have vanished. The friends from that time in my life have mostly moved away from the city and started different lives. New York grows ever more expensive, and the city's festive atmosphere has darkened under the shadow of the constant threat of terrorism. Even in our happy, reckless moments, at the back of our minds, our joy is tinged with the upsetting knowledge that elsewhere on the globe, war rages on.