What New York is your New York?

I wonder about women in New York and why we're here. It's a difficult city to inhabit if you want to have respect in your job, live in a nice apartment, afford the occasional new outfit and meet a decent man. Yet we're here en masse, and everywhere I look there's all trying to make it happen, all attempting to piece together their lives in a city of 8 million people.

There is the woman who gets on the bus and sits down next to me with her three handbags because one has documents for work, one has her after-work gym clothes and one has the lunch she makes at home the night before and brings to the office every day because she's trying to stretch that paycheck as much as possible. She finds a seat and quickly opens her book, (probably Eugenides because Oprah told her to), and doesn't look up or speak to anyone until she signals it's her time to deboard.

New York is not only her home, New York is her part-time job.

Of course there's always that other woman, who for some reason or other, always finds a spot right near me on public transportation as though I (intently reading and always determined to talk to no one that I don't absolutely have to) have a sign over my head with a bright flashing invitation that says: Sit here please! Annoy me!

This is all much like the woman from yesterday whose elbow was thrust into the back of my neck while I was reading, because apparently when she talks on the phone she has to gesticulate wildly. I was then forced to turn around to give her my best passive-aggressive, are you kidding me? look, however she was too busy on the phone (or I was too insignificant) for her to notice.

Now, leaning forward slightly, I listened (who could help but hear?) as she hung up and began to talk to the woman next to her about New York. About her New York. Not so much a part-time job as a paid vacation.

She also mentioned how time in her New York doesn't really start until people are up on the west coast. "I mean right?" she said, her voice sounding so girl-like for her age that it made my teeth itch. "New York is dead until people in LA are near their phones."

I couldn't hear a response from the woman next to her who she apparently decided to just start spouting off her opinions to. I can only imagine she nodded in passive-aggressive agreement.

"But I mean, I love New York. And really, it’s just like I’m Carrie from Sex and the City."

What is it with women all over the country who can't let go of that ridiculous show? No one writes a column and lives in a rent-controlled $700 a month apartment and can afford $300 shoes. No one should even acknowledge someone who has the ability to do that. And what's funny about it, is that any true New Yorker will tell you that the women depicted on that show really are irritating and live in a Manhattan that doesn't really exist, and it's always the non-New Yorkers who can't help but insist on trying to compare their lives to it.

"I really am. I mean, I'm a writer, I live in New York, I absolutely love shoes, and I actually have the same birthday as Sarah Jessica Parker! So I mean, it's totally me."

I laughed because I couldn't help it. I laughed because her voice was so serious and proud of those similarities that she made appear as though took her months to put together. I laughed because she was so utterly unaware of how pathetic and sad and how non-New York she really was.

It was all I could do to stop myself from turning around and seriously asking her, you're a writer?

She didn't hear me laugh of course, and even if she did this late-twenty-something clad in a too-short dress clutching her Treo and Louis Vuitton handbag (just one) would have been too caught up in her own world to notice.

As I watched her leave the bus loudly and with great drama, and then watched the woman next to me reading heft her three bags out so fast and so silently that I almost didn’t even see her leave - I thought about both and what New York must mean to each of them.

Sure, the SATC wannabe probably has a better apartment, more new outfits and a different man every month - but who appreciates it more? Who really understands it?

I guess it's difficult to say and I’ll never really know for sure, but I do know who I was rooting for. I know who would probably be here longer and who would learn more and who, living around these 8 million people, would be more likely to piece their life together. And who, upon deboarding, was at a great risk of being eaten alive.