Well Dear Reader, it has been about a year since the last interruption from our regularly scheduled program and, at risk of starting an unintended holiday tradition, I will beg your pardon for interrupting this nice,orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog with yet another intrusion from the present day….

The thing is, it’s been about a year since my ill-fated move to NY and I still absolutely hate it here. Through herculean efforts (and a pretty penny) I have devised schemes to spend way less time at ’home’, and these extended trips certainly do ease the pain of my daily life. But, everytime I step foot in New York again my mind/body/heart/soul scream for escape. Actually, to be more accurate, it screams for a great ball of fire to come crashing from the sky and burn this fucking city to the ground. Burn motherfucker burn!!!!…Bringing me to the topic of the day — hate.

I caught myself, walking down the street, mid ‘inferno fantasy’ and realized, maybe it’s time to revisit my hatred of this city via a dharma contemplation. As you will later see (when this blog catches-up to 2017) there have actually been a ton of these contemplations over the past year; but my hopes for a fire and brimstone-y christmas in NYC suggest I may have a little more work to do. The next few blogs will chronicle the outlines of my contemplation which I decided to begin with the topic of suffering.

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Hate Hurts Me and the People I Love: For any of you who have ever experienced all-consuming-rage-induced-murderous-hate, you know, it’s not really a walk in the park. Seriously, the feeling of burning hate is its own kind of suffering. I want to be a joyful person. I at least want to be a calm, content person. I want to be the person I feel like I am when I walk down the streets of San Fran, all chill and positive vibing, but this hatred is getting in the way.

And as I ball my fists and huff and puff at the driver who honks, my husband, standing next to me also feels my rage. He sees a hate-filled wife so different than the woman he loved  back in San Fran and he hurts. I grow short, raise my voice, lose my temper so easily when I am already so angry, and who else but the folks close to me, like Eric, is there to get the brunt of my attacks?

But I can’t help it … NY is filthy, loud, people are inconsiderate and self absorbed. I have standards, rules, for how cities and people in them should be. If a standard is failed, a condition of mine goes unmet, I don’t like it. When I encounter a beast like New York, which violates every one of my standards to the extreme, I have hate hate hate. Humm…maybe it’s my standards that cause hate not the city…maybe my standards hurt me and the people I love…

My Hate Inducing Standards are Risky Business: I have such tight standards, rules and a need for order, it bears asking the question –what happens when those standards don’t get met? What happens when Alana moves to NYC? Clearly, as we saw before, one unpleasant consequence is hate. But what risks come along with that?

When someone throws trash on the street (i.e. every 2 minutes) an image flashes in my mind of my murdering them by  tearing open their jugular. Of course,  I would never actually kill, of course, of course, right? But I have hurt people before — when they erode my happy world, fail my standards, take whats mine — as a kid I locked my neighbor in a rabbit cage because he took my little brother away from me as a playmate. I have left spiteful reviews on yelp,  thrown away valuable belongings of an ex, ‘accidentally’  elbowed or stepped on feet in a subway.

Each of these acts is different from murder in their degree or severity not in their nature or kind.  The cause, the hate/need to ‘defend’ myself, remains, and the risk of ‘karmic crime’ lurks with it. I am just waiting for a breach in standards big enough, a violation unforgivable enough, to turn my murder fantasy into reality. Where oh where did compassionate alana run off to?

But wait, there is more. These standards have perils on both sides. When someone is on the ‘wrong’ side of my standard I hate them, I want to punish them. But I use these same standards to shelter my own guilt, to cloak my wrong behaviors and call them  ‘right’ just because they fall on the ‘right’ side of my standards line. When I was in highschool, I had a ‘rule’, I would never mess around with someone else’s boyfriend. There was a guy I liked, already dating another girl, I didn’t ‘mess around’ with him, that would have been wrong. But I flirted, almosted, made him desire me so ultimately he broke-up with the other girl. Still, I did no wrong, I never broke my rule or my standard.  

The honking here is by far the worst offence in my mind. Honkers allow their frustration to drive them to hurt everyone around them, to wildly assault thousands of ears just because their commute takes an extra 2 minutes. I quietly seethe. I plot my imaginary revenge in  my head. That driver and I actually have a lot in common — anger and hate, frustration and broken expectations are what animate us both. But I am on the side of right. I am good, I keep it to myself. I don’t hurt thousands of people around me… I hurt just me, and the people I love, with my hate.

Arbitrary Standards: Clearly, not everyone hates Manhattan. If they did, this city would clear-out and I would finally have some peace and quiet. But alas, it is me. There is something in me that is ruffled by NY. Something about the rupa, the way the form of this place is arranged, that pushed my particular buttons. It violates my particular standards and rules. But here is the thing — these rules and standard are arbitrary. Why is making-out with someone else’s boyfriend wrong, but flirting is ok? Why is littering wrong but getting my stuff from Amazon, which over packages everything, ok? Why is hurting 1000s wrong but hurting 1 or 2 ok? Why is piles of trash on the sidewalk wrong but a messy underwear drawer ok?

In the end, I make my rules, based on what I value, and then I use them to  carve up the world and my own behaviors into rights and wrongs. But these rules, are not the rules that govern the world. If they were, Manhattan would be ¼ the size, sparkling clean, quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Shit as long as I’m at it, fluffy friendly dogs would roam the streets here just waiting to be pet…I make rules that will always be broken and then I suffer the hate, the perils, the misery when things are not the way I want. It begs a question, to be explored in next week’s blog — if it hurts so bad,  why do I gotta be such a hater?