NYC: A Great Place To Visit. But…

Sitting in the airport lounge waiting to hop on the plane to NYC, where I will spend the week in my company’s New York Office, visit a couple of clients and see some friends and family.

I really do love New York…to visit. And I can safely say from having spent a few years living on the great island of Manhattan that I definitely wouldn’t want to live there again.

And that’s not to say that New York isn’t one of the most amazing cities on earth. I just know that from an anthropological and semiotic perspective, it can be way too much for my delicate brain to handle. 😉

What I mean to say is, that NYC is a wonderland of culture and subculture and art and semiotics that can make your head spin…especially if you are someone like me who observes and “decodes” consumer culture and trends for a living.

New York really is one of the few global epicenters of all things past, present and future. To be there and witness it: to breathe it in and soak it into your pores can be a simultaneously thrilling and exhausting experience. Just “commuting” to work, i fill pages and pages of mental note-pads and mind-maps. I liken the experience to what it must be like to be Autistic and take in so much stimulus all the time without having the control or filters to weed out the noise. It can make you want to retreat into yourself entirely.

And if i am to be perfectly honest, my entire experience in NYC is one big commute filled with observation and analysis. I love to love New York but I know living there full time again would whittle me down. I do, however, love the feeling of getting off the airplane at my home-town terminal, getting in my car, and exiting off to the tree-lined streets that lead to my home “out in the woods” and feeling completely depleted, satisfied and grateful for the experience all at the same time.

New York is one of those places where I know I will always have an adventure. Looking forward to this week: to strategy, to weaving together stories from the insights, to celebrating a birthday in Brooklyn, watching cartoons with my niece and nephew and being overwhelmed by all the stimulus and memes NYC will have to offer.

It’s a great place to visit indeed. Looking forward to getting there and then getting home full of new tales to tell.