Moving to New York from Australia and deciding autonomously to set-up stumps in Long Island is kind of like moving from Perth to Mandurah, except for the 30-hour, $3000 flight to the opposite side of the globe.
The only reason anyone of sane mind would do so is if, A) They’re 95 and looking to retire; B) They’re 25 and traded their brick-laying job for a $200K-per-year FIFO gig, blowing up rocks while date-raping barmaids, which allowed them to bank $2 million, secure a hot 22-year old trophy wife, and promptly purchase a McMansion nestled on the man-made ‘Venice of Perth’ canals, as a blatant ‘Fuck you’ to the world (for the next five years, before you have to sell everything you purchased on credit). The final possible reason for moving to the poor man’s version of a capital city is, C) You’re any age, where the fact you’ve ‘glassed’ your way around Perth has resulted in you being banned from every pub around town, resulting in your eternal exile to the city’s ugly stepsister of the North.
Why anyone would want to pay significantly more rent to reside in a town ’30 minutes door-to-door’ from Manhattan, when about half a month’s rent would snag a seaside-view one-bedroom in Sydney’s ‘West Village’-esque Surry Hills, is as baffling as Adam Sandler directing a movie about Native Indians.
To make matters worse, the city in itself is a daily struggle against everything here conspiring against you. The redeeming qualities being: rooming with friends experiencing the similar first-world problems of scheduling time to do your laundry, reversing your underpants after failing to allot the time to do so, realizing the only three people over the age of 40 with whom you converse anytime ever are the local, toothless bartender, Asian liquor store owner and the Mexican Seamless delivery dude, while simultaneously consistently being too broke to do anything any of the things that motivated you to move here.
Remove friends, cheap local dive bars and a vibrant, albeit rat-infested neighborhood, and what you’re left with is a sad, yet mildly interesting Australian living alone in a tiny apartment in ‘that city’ that’s still recovering from Hurricane Sandy, three years later.
Now a permanent resident of the ‘little town that could’ – our said Australian becomes the newest ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ apprentice conductor, attempting to carve out a social presence in his ghost town new digs (when he’ not otherwise chained to his desk, of course).
Perhaps one fun activity for him amid the cultural wasteland could be Tinder, although that game would likely run dry very quickly as there’s only so many times you can swipe left on your next-door neighbor’s 16-year old teen mom (and her rad, ultra-hip selection of New York-inspired trucker caps)…
But wait – there’s an upside to being all alone with nothing to do each weekend like Cinderella, locked in your spacious one-bedroom abode!
Parents and friends will have a free place to crash when they visit! Which will make that easy-peasy door-to-door commute to work on Monday morning all the more palatable, as your friends remain asleep, snoring like freight trains as they nurse their hangovers from a big, raging night out in the East Village, following which they spam your Instagram feed with pretty, filtered images of a jam-packed five, (no wait, make that 10, now that we don’t have to pay for accommodation!) days in the Big Apple, gallivanting about town, ticking off the boxes of all of the attractions you are yet to see or do.
As the months and years grind by, you quickly and regrettably realize that you’ve lived in Long Island for five years, still single, and stuck in the same job, having lacked the time or energy to search for a better one. And just like that, a property report pops up in your inbox, informing you that the mining boom has ended and that drop-kick you went to school with, the one that purchased a McMansion in Mandurah, has filed for bankruptcy.
You look into it, make the necessary arrangements, and relocate back to Australia, managing to avoid the niggling issues most experience with the repatriation process, namely because you don’t really have much to repatriate yourself to, having authentically ‘lived’ in the U.S. about as much time as Kanye has officially ‘lived’ in Kim K.
Half a decade of your life now gone, you sit on the porch, overlooking the man-made canal, as your new wife, the ex of the former, disgraced blue-collar owner of your new house, who is still kind-of hot in a wrinkly leather sort of way, popping a couple of ice blocks into the glass of her fourth chardonnay, wondering what you could have done differently.
‘Not move to Long Island!’ your inner Carrie Bradshaw screams, in the first person way that only classic Ms. Bradshaw can.
‘Oh well,’ he thought, shrugging off any feelings of regret as he issued a gentle wave to the elderly couple cruising down the canal in a rubber dinghy. ‘I’ll always have the convenient commute,’ he reassured himself, with the conviction of a black NYU student preparing to put their hands up, ‘And ain’t no one can ever take that away from me.’
Armed with a renewed sense of confidence, he promptly grab a couple of glass bottles from the trash and headed off for an evening of glassing.
And just this, because #Australia.
