As time passes, I am increasingly aware of how lucky I am.  A lot of that luck is an absence of bad things; it seems like chronic physical illness or pain and persistent financial difficulty are two of the things that most readily sap away happiness, and I'm lucky to be free of both of those.  But it's more than that.  I haven't been terribly adept at arranging my life - in fact, I haven't really arranged my life at all - and yet somehow I've happened onto an arrangement so awesome that I don't think I would have dared to try to arrange it.  Not to gloat, but I live in a not-completely-awful apartment in an awesome neighborhood, I have a good job that I'm good at, and I spend my spare time attending cultural events and playing outside.  The other day, I was accidentally a complete bitch when I interrupted a semi-serious conversation with a friend in order to go to bed because - as I told her - I had to get up in six hours to get a spin bike.  I don't just have white girl problems, I have upper west side problems.

I feel like I talk about this a lot, and like it maybe gets old, and my reader(s) are tired of hearing about it.  But it really does baffle me.  How did I get here?  It feels like I spent ten years wandering in the desert of academia before arriving pretty much at random in the promised land (NYC as Israel is not actually the worst analogy ever).  Sure, the city is draining sometimes, there is stress, taxis are evil, etc.  But I don't see how I could ever stop being grateful for being here - in a city that is the setting for so many movies and so many dreams, and in a life that surprises me constantly with its variety and ability to renew itself.  Sometimes I wish I had gotten here sooner, but I think maybe I needed that decade of wandering, because "here" is not just New York; it's the state of being out of the wilderness that was my twenties, when I had no idea who or what I might be and was utterly at the mercy of every flickering whim around me.