Sex and Another Me

Today, I am a criminal.

No, I am not confessing to any involvement in the JonBenet Ramsey case (is there anyone left out there who doesn't think her parents did it for the insurance money?). I am not fessing up to a jewelry heist or a bank robbery. But I am a criminal nevertheless:

Tonight, I watched a copyrighted film, currently in theatres, via an illegal downloading site.

Now, unlike most of the people out there who do this, I like to think I have an excuse. At the present moment, I am at least a three-hour flight from any English-speaking country. Moscow gets more than its share of American movies--heck, I cannot recall the last time I saw a billboard ad for a film that wasn't American--but they are almost invariably shown dubbed in Russian. A few theatres, I am told, show the films dubbed but with an English translation provided by voice actors and delivered over headphones (I almost took a gig doing this myself), but few films are shown with the original English audio track because of complicated disputes between American studios and Russian distributors. So my ability to see an English-language film as it was intended to be seen is next to nill.

Generally, I consider myself not quite a technophobe but definitely not someone on the cutting edge of technology trends. It took graduating from college with no definite plans to get me to get a cell phone, and grad school exploration to get me to join Facebook. I took my plunge into streaming Hollywood films only because a fellow teacher with whom I had dinner mentioned how easy it was. That's about what it takes to sell me on new technology; if I am convinced a six-year-old could do it, I'll give it a whirl. Otherwise, I can't be bothered.

What movie did I choose for my foray into criminality, you ask? A thriller like Hitchcock? A splash musical like Mamma Mia? A guilty desire like Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2?

No, not any of those. I turned criminal for, of all things, a peek at Carrie Bradshaw's nuptials in the Sex and the City movie.

People who know me well know that I have a complicated relationship with Carrie and her galpals. For a long time, I have been somewhat fascinated but mostly repulsed by these women. For all the hype about how modern and "liberated" the gals on Sex and the City supposedly are, I mostly find them to be shallow and vain. What Manolos have to do with modernity for women has always escaped me.

And yet, for a long time, I felt a need to gape at these women and, through them, at the life they seemed to represent, the life I associate with what I still call The Other New York. The Inescapable New York. The New York of New York Magazine, a fantasy world that, if it ventures beyond the Upper East Side at all, does so only to take a yardstick to property values in Carroll Gardens so that it can feel even richer.

And though I hate to confess it, for a long time I was under the spell of that New York.

When I first encountered Carrie and company, I had just moved to Brooklyn, to what I saw as my delxue apartment in the sky (only on the fourth floor of a converted warehouse, but what the hey?). A few months previous, a year of searching had finally landed me my first job, a position as a corporate paralegal at a big firm in Midtown. In September of that year, I had my fifteen minutes of fame when the New York Times real estate section did a piece on my apartment hunt. For a brief, shining minute, I was like the people at the opening of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, convinced that all my days would be sunny and fair.

Reality ultimately didn't turn out that way, of course, which is how, after a long series of events, I ended up here. But for a time, I thought I was on my way up, up, up in the world. I bought a bedroom full of white IKEA furniture and painted my rented walls a deep shade of blue. Interior decorating became as much my obsession as strappy sandals were Carrie Bradshaw's. And I felt an urge to find out about what I understood to be the sophisticated world Sex and the City represented. Over the course of two and a half months, I rented all six seasons of SATC on DVD and watched them from under my gold jacquard bedding.

Over the course of those six months, my feelings about the Carrie Bradshaw world soured. I was seeing appalling behavior from the attorneys at my office and appalling behavior from the computer screen at home. Yet somehow I felt trapped into having to pursue that kind of life, even if, deep down, I knew I didn't really want it. My family had just spent a lot of money to help me get up and onto my feet, and I couldn't just throw it away just because it didn't really make me happy. Or so my thinking went at the time.

Eventually, things came to a head. Depression set in. And to make matters even worse, I lost the job I had spent so much time desperately trying to find. But instead of reassessing whether this was really a life I wanted, and taking steps to get one I did, I told myself I had no choice but to look for another, similar job. A period of unemployment was not the time, I believed, to try to find a new career, let alone a new life.

Shortly before I lost my job, the final touches to my efforts at decorating arrived at my door: cheap reproductions of vintage travel posters I had bought to give my bedroom a funky, retro feel. I had bought them thinking they would make my room into an oasis of escape, not the thing that prevented my escape. I can still see them now, in their gorgeous yellows and greens, beckoning me to see far off France and Italy, places I was sure I would never actually set foot on.

I still don't know if I'll ever make it to France or Italy, though at the moment my sites are set on St. Petersburg (I hope to get there at the end of this month). Now I am off traveling instead of creating a fantasy world of travel in my bedroom. It took another lost job, and months and months of searching for a position that would give me a shot at joining The Other New York, before I finally sold off the IKEA furniture, gave the vintage travel posters to a friend for safekeeping, and got on a plane.

Seeing Carrie Bradshaw again makes me realize just how much I have managed to grow up in the past four years. Despite all the drama and all the problems, I have made progress. I have gotten on pills and conquered my depression. I finally mustered enough self-respect to take a job in a country I actually did want to go to, to do work I actually did want to do, after an abortive stint in a country I had never had any eagerness to see.

But most of all, I am no longer under the spell of The Other New York. First, I looked on the Carrie Bradshaws of the world as people to envy, then as people to hate because I thought they were keeping me down. But now, finally, I can look on them with what they deserve: my complete and total indifference.

I still harbor dreams of making it back to the Big Apple. But my dreams now center around a graduate program at Jewish Theological Seminary and hopes of finding work that gives me meaning and self-respect, not just a paycheck. I know now that there are many, many different New Yorks, not just one.

And I just may have a good shot of finding mine.