Ok, a little background info: I’m an entering senior at NYU but, because of a lack of funds stemming back several generations of Italian peasants, I’m back at home at a suburb in MA for the summer.

This creates a not-so-unique dilemma of: “What the hell do I write about?”

In New York City, or any metropolitan really, there is inspiration standing on every sidewalk, crawling in every cafe, and leaking from every poorly-drained subway station’s ceiling. But here in the suburbs?

Here in the suburbs, everyone seems to get up at the same time everyday for their blue-collared jobs. Everyone finishes their day with a nightcap at a sports bar. Everyone spends their weekends drunk at a party or their favorite “club,” which is more like a slightly nicer sports club than anything else. Most of all, sometimes when you’ve been living in the same place for 21 years and you’ve seen the same faces and heard the sam names, you being to think that you have everybody figured out.

I’m trying to learn to write whereever I am. Writing in New York is easy. After all, there are a million brilliant characters, courtesy of God (or Darwin?), waiting to be plagiarized into the plot of your next work. Every face you see has something new etched in its wrinkles, every name you hear seems to have a compelling story behind it. Of course, you have to deal with perilous traffic and dangerous-seeming streets late at night, but that is part of the excitement and the suspense.

Writing in the suburbs becomes a new sort of challenge. It requires one to imagine and inquire much more actively than in the city, where the stories and the insight seem to be worn on the sleeve of every neighborhood. Everyday, I have to look at everything and try to see it from a new angle. After over twenty years, you have to get creative.

Maybe I’ll watch the friendly dude at the grocery store bakery who always made the cheesiest yet most lovable cakes for my birthday and suddenly notice that he’s flirting with a 25-year-old blonde in front of his deli-meat-slinging wife. Or I might wake up one day and notice that the door to our downstairs closet is about 3/4ths the size of every other door in the house. Has it always been this size? When did it become different?

I know I’m about a bazillion years too young (as demonstrated by my use of “bazillion”) to be feeling jaded, but I really think suburban life does that to you in a strange way. It’s not the gritty, adversity-defying kind of jadedness one sees in the heart of urban squalor, but this sort of emptying of one’s imaginative capacity that comes with the reduncy of suburb life.

So maybe tomorrow I will write about another silly neighbor at another silly party, one who drinks until the world looks fun again.