Best pizza? Best bagels? Biggest superiority complex?

I love New York City. I really do. I often say I'd like to move there, and I mean it. But there's something I really hate about the city, and it's something I saw reflected perfectly in a single sentence in the New York Times today. It was this line, contained in the third graf of a story about all the rain that has dampered the state:

The storm that parked itself over the metropolitan region may have been nastier to New Jersey and Long Island, submerging streets and flooding basements and blowing down trees, but it left the city a soggy, frustrated mess.

Now, first: This storm has actually been hitting all of New England. I live near Boston and went to Vermont over the weekend, and I haven't seen a dry street in a week. But, ok. Fine. It's the Times -- even though it's a national paper, I'll still allow it to focus on New York. But what I hate about New York City is its centric mentality -- its insistance that anything outside the city is marginal, is far away, is not really worth attention. Anyone watch "Sex and the City"? Remember when Miranda moved to Brooklyn, and the girls acted like she was moving to Tibet? That's what I'm talking about.

So, back to this sentence from the paper. "...may have been nastier to New Jersey and Long Island, submerging streets and flooding basements and blowing down trees, but it left the city a soggy, frustrated mess." Yes, yes, just down the street in Long Island, streets were under water and basements were flooded. Yes, sure, lives were impacted. But forget about that! In the city -- ohmigod! -- we were wet! Wet and... frustrated!

Posted by Jason Feifer at October 14, 2005 10:04 AM