N.Y.U.ME.

Sunday was a long day for me. Five-and-a-half hour drive. Two hour train ride. Bee sting dramarama.

But there seriously is nothing like coming home to a city you love.

As we zoomed down 5th Ave, the cab windows open, hitting every green light, a sneaky, involuntary smile found its way to my face, surprising me.

$7.40 later, I was in my ‘hood. The evening was quite lovely - balmy yet oddly cool. I took a deep breath and thought how unabashedly happy I was to be back in NYC.

Then I saw them...swarms of them. Gaggles of new NYU students hanging in the street, meeting and greeting, sizing up one another.

I’d taken for granted how positively peaceful - well, relatively speaking - my street had been for the past three months. No cacophonous kiddies keeping me up, yo!

But with the advent of my most hated season (fine, second most hated), so too come the students. A new influx of freshmen to judge and be judged by (sure, I’m eight years their senior but I’m still a girl).

Thankfully I missed move-in day. Last year was a nightmare - albeit a fairly informative nightmare. I learned that streets in the Village also moonlight as parking lots. New York likes to multitask.

And the SIDEWALKS!! As if they’re not already difficult enough to navigate with all the stupid tourists, they become borderline impenetrable. These kids travel in posses so big it’s like walking behind a herd of elephants.

And, unluckily for me, they’re just as loud.

Not to be too much of a square or anything, but seriously. It’s just not cool to be rudely awakened in the middle of a Sunday night. Especially when your name is Katie Parry and you’ve been - unsuccessfully -willing your body to sleep for hours.

No thank you, shitload of screeching girls.

Nor do I appreciate the inundation of my neighborhood go-to’s. No, I don’t want to wait an hour for a mani-pedi. Um, I am actually legal and don’t want to hang with underagers at Off the Wagon (they just make me feel old). Joe’s pizza has a long enough line without you little shits.

When it comes down to it, though, I’m not sure it’s my close proximity to Teens Gone Wild, New York City redux. Or the fact that they take up so much space. Or that they insist on being loud little assholes when I’m trying to get my beauty sleep. Or that they make parking lots of my streets. 

No. I think what irks me most is the jealousy. They are just beginning an adventure that’s no doubt gonna be on their short list of Life’s Best Experiences.

They’re making new friends and having all sorts of ridiculous, life-changing escapades as I write this (rewatching Mad Men was the highlight of my evening). Perhaps they just puffed their first joint, chugged their first warm Natty, or had their first co-ed sleepover.

No parents, no rules!
They’re all so very young and have so very much to look forward to and I just want to tell them, all of them, even the skanks I just saw going out wearing matching sequined dresses and five-inch heels, to keep their eyes wide open the whole time and not blink because it really will be over before you know it and there’s nothing you can do to get it back. 

Today is September 1st. New Year’s Day on Kathy Cobb’s ideal calendar. I have had two days with these kids and they’re already pissing me off a whole hell of a lot with their über short skirts and their stupid lanyards with their IDs around their necks and their pack-like herds and their incessant shouting.
But again, I guess what it comes down to is that I’m absurdly jealous of this adventure they’re embarking on. And I’m utterly stupefied that my time as a frosh at Muhlenberg College already came and went and that _____ (a lot) of years ago.

Sure, they’re assholes. But I guess they’re allowed to be. They have just started their freshmen year of college, after all. I guess I just wish for the sake of my melatonin-deficient brain that NYU’s campus was in one of the other four burroughs.