Drinking the Kool-Aid

When I was in high school, I went on a couple of trips to Ukraine to teach English. Or really, I went to snobbishly turn my nose up at their consumption of mayonnaise pizza and volunteer to be the trip "photographer" in order to avoid playing the team-building games.

Before these trips, I always stocked up on packets of Kool-Aid Pink Lemonade mix and Equal to fill up my water bottles and swallowed a lot of Pepto to protect my stress-addled stomach against any foreign entities in the water supply.

"You know, we don't even drink the water," I was later told by a Ukrainian native, mid-swig of my pink liquid.

THAT CAN'T BE GOOD.

My immediate thought: Chernobyl, of course! I fully cop to hypochondriacal tendencies, but you skeptics have to admit, picking up some radioactive elements over there is not totally out of the realm of possibility. So the radon, the fallout, it's still in me, six years later, for better or for worse, and there's nothing I can do about it.

I have been in New York for 11 months officially. My year comes up on September 21. And although I am far from a native Manhattanite, this city is in me, and I'm stuck with it, the New York essence if you will (and you will), forever.

The smells- decaying carcass (the 4, 5 at 59th St., I'm looking at you), chlorine (5th Ave. by Bendel's), or the much needed whiff of fragrant flowers outside a local neighborhood deli. The scars from pounding the pavement in unreliable shoes. The marks from mysterious bug bites. The extra girth from this, this, and sure, ok, this. New York is with me. I drank the Kool-Aid.

And I unabashedly feel like this:

I'll be headed down south in a few days for a long weekend catch up with my dear college friends. As delighted as I am for the trip, I know I will be racked with the nagging idea that I am Definitely Missing Out. 'What's going on up there?' 'What am I missing?'

Last time I visited, my friend embraced me and said, "I feel like I'm hugging a celebrity!" (And that was before this). Now I fear they are going to admonish me for my increased profanity slips and for hipchecking the undergrad in Kroger who was blocking my view of the peach Andre.