I "heart" F.N.Y.

Today, the packing boxes arrived, along with a suitably excessive amount of packing tape and about 35 miles of bubble wrap. The bubble wrap comes in its own dispenser and is perforated every 12 inches, like a giant roll of highly ineffective toilet paper.

The bubble wrap is what finally made it all hit home - we're actually moving. If you have industrial quantities of bubble wrap in your house, you're either moving, or you've got a serious psychiatric problem. In our case, both apply. But the moving thing is new.

Having lived in our current apartment for two years and nine months, it's the longest I've ever lived anywhere since moving out of my parents' house at age 17. Like most of us in New York, I've moved often and hastily, as if running away from a Dark Past.

In this town, grown adults in their 20s, 30s and 80s continue to live like college students, shuffling from one unbelieveably crappy apartment to another. But in Manhattan, an apartment the size of my freshman dorm room is called a "FLEX 3-BDRM only $4400!!! WOW!!! Call NOW!!! Won't Last!!!!!" The only difference is that the "Phish" posters have been replaced by wall sconces from Crate and Barrel, which is arguably not an improvement.

But by New York standards, this most recent apartment has been great. Well, except for the vomiting bathtub, and the 10 minutes of hot water alotted daily by the quaint "Pre-war!" water heater, or the time we got locked in our bedroom for so long we had to pee in the litterbox (don't ask....). But still.

The Linda Blair plumbing, like a lot of other "quirks" (a.k.a. Building Code violations) can be overlooked when you're half a block from Central Park. There are high ceilings and beautiful hardwood floors that only occasionally cause Paul to fall and break his arm in 3 places, requiring major reconstructive surgery. And, if you stick your head out the window and strain your neck a bit, in the summertime you can almost - almost - see a real-live tree.

Our New York friends tend to be impressed with the good deal we have. However, our out-of-town guests are typically underwhelmed.

"You pay how much for this place?" they ask. We tell them; they laugh nervously.

"Uh, you know, that's three time more than the morgage on our 5-bedroom house with an indoor swimming pool! But of course, keeping up the stables in the backyard is expensive. Really. Be glad you don't have room for horses! "

Then I throw up a little in my mouth.

Still, it's hard to imagine life anywhere other than New York, even though life in New York is not always easy, or even tolerable. It's absolutely nothing like on Friends or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, or Matlock. Not that Matlock took place in New York. But it might as well have.

Don't get me wrong - I liked shows like Sex and the City as much as the next person, but you'd might as well be watching a Harry Potter movie. I mean, really - who could walk around Manhattan in 5-inch Jimmy Choos without calling on the powers of darkness? But gravity doesn't work the same on T.V., and I'm not just talking about boobs. In the New York shows, it's always Amnesia Season - one of the two or three weeks of the year when you can wear a halter top, in that alternate reality where they never seem tacky.

Fictional New York (FNY) is the urban Lake Wobegone -- a place where the women all wear miniskirts and 4-inch heels to work (as, say, a cardiologist); where the straight men are always fashionably dressed; and the poor black children are always adopted by kindly old white dudes.

In FNY, every 20 or 30-something somehow has a rent controlled (not just rent stablized) apartment, even though they aren't named Bertha or Elmer. There are a lot of high-speed car chases in FNY, but the bad guy is always bad, and not just the wrong color. And he always makes a full, uncoerced confession by the end of the episode.

I don't think I'm going to miss New York as much as I'm going to miss the idea of it; how it looks from a distance when you're on the bridge in a taxi at night, coming in from JFK.

I'm talking about the autumnal New York of Annie Hall, in the version of things where Woody Allen's character actually ends up with the eponymous Annie, and they live happily ever after (or at least with the consolation of shared neuroses). But even in the movie, you know it's not in the fabric of things. The real world is less perfect. In the real world, the "happy ending" is something you get for $50 extra at a seedy massage parlor, and Woody Allen marries his ex-stepdaughter, something that even the French find creepy (we all knew there had to be something).

In Fictional New York it's always early October, when the leaves are changing. It's not too hot, not too cold. People spend their immense free time strolling around, making pithy, yet humorous (if not necessarily "ha-ha" funny) observations before heading back to their phat pads.

Sigh.

Now that I'm moving away, I can pretend that I once lived there, too.