My boyfriend and I like to talk about how people who don’t live in NYC shouldn’t be allowed to complain about things. It’s not that we don’t think other people’s problems are valid; it’s that problems that are manageable elsewhere are compacted by 100 here.

Hate sitting in your freezing car while it warms up? Hate driving in snow? Try waiting out in the cold for the bus. Try walking through the snow while cabs spray dirty slush onto your slacks.

Think your groceries are too expensive? Don’t have the money to eat out? Here, we pay anywhere from $1 extra to literally twice as much for the same things I used to buy in Ohio. Our grocery stores have one brand of some things and no brands of other things. We go to crappy chain restaurants in Times Square just for the novelty and drop $25 on the plates we used to pay $5 for in our homelands.

Wish you owned your own home? Think your kitchen’s too small? Want more storage space? Hate not having a guest room? Need a new washer/dryer? YOU ARE RIDICULOUS.

I don’t mean to pretend like there aren’t a million benefits to living in NYC, and obviously I love it enough to have spent five and a half years here. It’s just that sometimes I look at my friends lives, and they just seem so easy. I mean, not to put my best friend on the spot here, but she has a bazillion-room house in Ohio with a guest bedroom, an office, and a craft room that she had to put something like 3% down for. (Here, it’s no less than 20% down–even that’s oftentimes not enough–and we’re talking 20% on half-a-million-dollar one-bedroom condos.) She has a two-car garage, every retail giant imaginable right down the street, two personalitied cats and a place to put their litter boxes, the ability to do her laundry right in her house, and three bathrooms that ensure she, her husband, and I can all poo at the same time when I visit. That’s livin’ the dream, man.

But sometimes–and I don’t intend at all for this to sound mean–everything outside of NYC all seems a little generic. Everyone has their carpeted floors and their beige walls, their drive to work with their favourite radio station, their Walmarts and their Red Robins. They have boxes of decorations for each of the holidays and garages full of lawn-trimming equipment, a TV in every room and newspaper clippings of TVs they’d like to buy. The idea of once again having church-going homophobe friends who birth a bunch of babies because they mistakenly think their DNA’s worth passing on sort of makes me sick to my stomach.

Of course, it also seems very familiar, and I’m nostalgic enough to be attracted to that. Sometimes, when my best friend sends me a recipe for homemade Pizza Rolls and I look around my boyfriend’s 250-square foot studio and notice he has no oven, I think, “I will look back at this time in my life someday and ask myself, ‘HOW THE HELL DID I SURVIVE THIS?”’ Sometimes I think about the one-bedroom apartment my boyfriend almost bought, and I crave that extra room and a TV for it. Sometimes I crave an apartment in someplace like Los Angeles or Irvine–places that seemed so not New York City not so long ago–where my boyfriend and I can cook dinner in a room that isn’t also his living room, dining room, office, and bedroom.

How old do you have to be before you can’t live like a college student anymore? But how much will you miss it when you’re not?