This has been a domestic month for me, more so than any since I started traveling. Even during the pandemic I was always trying to get somewhere, even if I was stalled for most of it. My heart was elsewhere. But I landed in New York with the intention of settling somewhere briefly. And sure, it was only for a month, but it felt different.

I always knew I’d be leaving the day after Christmas; I had booked the flights months ago. At the time I assumed I’d be traveling through between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but instead it turned out I needed to visit doctors and deal with prescriptions and am still recovering from my medical emergency. It made sense to stay put.

If I were stuck here I’d say I’ve been consoling myself with New York, but I chose to be here. So while I took a little time to see some things in the city — Sleep No More,¹ the Christmas tree at the Met,² and the LAND statue in Brooklyn Bridge Park³ — the bulk of my time was spent in quotidian concerns. I cooked a bit for my brother and sister-in-law, went to the doctor’s a couple times to monitor my heart, visited the movies with my father,⁴ and otherwise lounged around and played video games.⁵ I even suggested the Christmas-themed, kid-friendly “Spoons and Toons” event at the local hipster movie theater, which was a big hit with the kids.⁶

I wasn’t entirely sedentary. I caught the train up to Boston in early December and took another one later in the month up into the Hudson Valley. Both were to visit friends rather than sightsee.⁷ In Boston I was staying just north of the city, and made it in a couple times to see shows, most notably The Slutcracker.⁸ I had longer in Catskill⁹ but ironically my friend was recovering from a cold and we ended up staying in more because of it, only really venturing out once to Woodstock to check out Amanda Palmer’s “Party Around a Piano” event.¹⁰ Catskill was the first place I’ve been since COVID in Ireland where you more-or-less had to cook — food delivery was lacking — and so I had a chance to regain my culinary skills a little more, even discovering a recipe for dal which I liked so much I made it again once I returned to New York City.¹¹

Christmas Day was nice. My niece and nephew opened presents¹² and then I headed for Chinatown for a dim sum brunch with friends. The afternoon was filled with board games, after which I returned to my brother’s apartment for a full Christmas dinner — roast beast,¹³ mashed potatoes, stuffing, cabbage slaw, mushroom gravy, and both pumpkin and apple cranberry pie.¹⁴

I got a three-month prescription filled for my heart medication¹⁵ just before I left, so I’m planning on being in Europe at least that long. There’s an appointment with a cardiologist for me scheduled for March in New York City, but I’m mulling the possibility of moving to Portugal and getting on the medical rolls there first. It’d allow me to start to establish some continuity of care in Europe. We’ll have to see.

Right now I’m on a flight to London, where I’m staying overnight before heading to Berlin for New Year’s. I’ve managed to cobble together a fairly busy January, but my plans beyond that are sketchy. I may be establishing some kind of residency in Portugal earlier than I expected just for medical access,¹⁶ but that’s yet to be determined.

I’ll miss New York — I always miss New York — but there’s not much I’ll miss of the United States in general.¹⁷ Just my friends. And that’s the biggest impediment to settling down anywhere; I’m going to have to live in Portugal for at least five years, but my friend group is scattered hither and yon. There’s not much appeal in living anywhere if it means rarely seeing the people I care about most. You can say I’ll make friends wherever I settle, but history suggests that’s not really true and, even if I do, are your friends really so interchangeable?

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Footnotes

¹ Sleep No More is closing and my opinion was largely the same as the first time I saw it. It has great scenography and some stellar set pieces but it can be confusing and disjointed, even more so when you’re expected to hike four flights of stairs multiple times over the course of three hours. I must be improving somewhat, since that would have been flatly impossible six weeks ago, but I definitely started flagging at about the half-way mark and ended up in much worse shape at the end of the evening than I had the first time around.

² I visited the Christmas tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly every year when I was living in the city. They set it up in their Medieval Wing and surround it with small sculpted figures from 18^th century Naples, angels and wise men and merchants and street performers all around a small manger with Joseph, Mary, and the baby Jesus. There’s soft choral music playing and the lights are kept low. It’s honestly one of the more soothing spaces you can find in New York City, and if you decide to go — it runs through the first week of January — I suggest hitting it over your lunch break midweek. It’s best when it’s not crowded, when you can get some space for yourself.

³ The LAND statue is a public sculpture temporarily installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park by Nicholas Galanin, properly titled In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra. It’s a homage to the iconic LOVE statue by Robert Indiana, only it’s the size of a small house and constructed of the same material the US border wall with Mexico is made out of. I had read about it when it was first put up in May and made a note to see it when I was in the city. I thought I had missed it since it was scheduled to come down in November, but it got extended, and I got to see it and grab a pizza with a friend afterwards at Juliana’s. The sculpture was great, the pizza was sublime, and the company was unbeatable.

⁴ The Marvels. It’s slight but fun, not nearly as ponderous as recent MCU outings have been, and deserved far better than the reception it got.

⁵ I spent an inordinate amount of time playing and finishing Marvel’s Midnight Suns which I had thought was a tactical card-based battle game (and it has that part) but turns out primarily to be a full-on friendship sim. Seriously, ⅔ of the game is going mushroom picking with friends or hosting movie nights or lounging by the pool or picking out the perfect scented candle for your new bestie. Only your new bestie is Iron Man or Ghost Rider or Captain Marvel.

It’s also got a really weird female-focused storyline, with the main antagonist being an ancient sorceress named Lilith, their sister (a gender-swapped Caretaker) being the leader of the Midnight Suns, and a rather long side plot involving witches being tortured and persecuted in Salem. There’s also a heavily-implied romantic relationship between Caretaker and Abigail Harkness. Plus the aforementioned focus on interpersonal dynamics and emotional health wouldn’t feel out of place in Jane Austin.

That’s only really weird in terms of Marvel Comics, at least the classic four-color ones that the game otherwise seems to be consciously mimicking. You’ll come from a mission of smashing bad guys into street lamps and explosive barrels to having a quiet night in at a book club where Blade will explain that reading The Art of War made them realize they had defined all their intimate relationships around conflict. I’m not objecting, although it did feel a bit like a bait-and-switch to me. The tactical bits turn out to be good but not great, and they needed something to pad out the run time. Why not run around the woods of Massachusetts, talking about your feelings while looking for the bones of a lost coven? I suppose demonic witchery is as good a plot motivator as alien technogadgetry. And the world would be a better place if its superpowers were more prone to introspection, as well.

⁶ The Nitehawk is a NYC-based competitor to the Alamo Drafthouse in the get-a-fancy-meal-and-pricey-cocktails-while-watching-a-movie space, and they have a monthly event where they play Saturday morning cartoons and serve all-you-can-eat sugary cereal. This month all the cartoons were Christmas-themed, and if I’m being honest the kids were more into the unlimited cereal than the show.

I had no idea all the major cereal companies come out with special flavors for the holiday, although it doesn’t surprise me. I had a modest bowl of gingerbread-flavored Cinnamon Toast Crunch and I can report it’s fantastic.

⁷ I really do try to avoid crashing with people for any longer than a week, and even that feels like pushing it. I’ve been staying in New York City with my father who has graciously been sleeping on the couch while I take the bedroom. I offered to swap places but there are practical impediments to that — it’s a small one-bedroom apartment, I need a quiet space to work, and my father watches television all day from early in the morning to late at night — so we’d be constantly tripping over each other swapping places.

⁸ A long-running burlesque sendup of The Nutcracker. I’ll just say the toy Clara receives is plastic and pink and requires batteries and leave it at that.

⁹ I had no idea there was actually a Catskill in the Catskills, but there is and my friend lives there.

¹⁰ Amanda Palmer bought a kind of café/performance space a few years ago called Graveside Variety — it’s next to a graveyard — and has been trying to figure out what to do with it. And one of the ideas was to invite a bunch of cabaret performers up from New York City every other week to do a kind of live-piano-based karaoke. It’s an intimate crowd, the audience is invited to come up and sing, and the performers fill in downtime with what is naturally mostly show tunes. It’s a relaxed, low-key vibe.

My friend spent a lot of time in the week leading up to the event assuring me that although they had never personally seen it, Amanda Palmer was known to drop in from time to time. And as luck would have it I turned up on one of the nights when Amanda Palmer actually did. And even performed two songs.

¹¹ I realize I’m a couple years too late for the overnight oats fad, but for the first time I’m making a concerted effort to eat healthily at the same time I’m someplace with basic cooking supplies. And being a night owl it’s a massive effort to cook anything before 10am, which is why I’ve mostly been grabbing a piece of fruit when I wake up. Needless to say, being able to throw some oats and milk and maple syrup in a tupperware container and toss it in the fridge the day before has greatly broadened my healthy breakfast options. I’m partial to cinnamon, and hazelnut milk works fantastically.

¹² In about 10 minutes flat, barely getting the wrapping paper off of one before tearing into the next one. I’ve suggested pacing them next year, to have a little time for one gift to register before going on to the next one.

I got my niece a giant stuffed penguin and my nephew a Donkey Kong Lego set. I also got them a book each, which my niece took out of the wrapping paper, saw, and threw it to the ground while announcing “It’s a book!” in the same tone of voice one uses to point out a cockroach. Apparently we’re in an anti-book phase.

¹³ Roast plant-based beast for me; I noticed Field Roast had a vegan holiday roast for sale and figured this was as good an opportunity to try it as any. It’s good. Not the sort of thing I’d eat on its own, but it’s a reasonable option if you don’t want to just eat side dishes at a festive dinner, especially since you just take it out of the box and throw it in the oven.

¹⁴ The stuffing, slaw, and mashed potatoes were homemade. The rest was obtained from various local stores. It was a massive amount of carbs, especially coming on the heels of overdoing it at dim sum, but I figured if I was going to get a pass on eating unhealthily any day of the year, this was probably it.

¹⁵ After literally three hours on the phone bouncing between my insurance, my pharmacy, and the doctor’s office. My insurance refuses to cover more than a month’s prescription at a time unless you order through their mail-order pharmacy (which takes about a week to process and ship out your medications) or get them to process a special “vacation override” and both of these things seem an awful lot like a way to cut down on their costs by making your access to health care as difficult as possible.

And of course, even after all that, my doctor’s office fucked up and only sent a 45-day supply of one of my medications to the pharmacy rather than the 90-day I should have gotten, so I’m having to have that one filled, then FedExed to a friend to bring over to Europe where I can get it.

¹⁶ If you’ve reached the stage in the application process that I have, you’re permitted to move there early.

¹⁷ Seltzer water comes to mind. You can usually find bubbly mineral water in Europe, but the United States continues to innovate on the sparkling water front. My brother’s a big fan of Spindrift, which has a line of only slightly sweet sparking water that only have about 15 calories each. And there’s now a few varieties of caffeine-free organic sodas knocking around that use a mix of sugar and stevia and come in around 25 calories each but taste pretty close to the kind of sugary sodas I’m not supposed to be drinking at all. They’re nice to have once a week or so, and the seasonal Cranberry Fizz was great.