CerebralDebris

Well, the time has just about come for Charlotte and I to say goodbye to New York for a while. We’ve decided that at the end of June, we will move to Indianapolis, IN, a smaller city in the midwest, for at least a year.

Reactions from our friends have been fairly uniform thus far: they’re mostly baffled and minorly horrified. Everyone in New York seems to think that Indy is somewhere in the deep south, populated entirely by gay-hating, bible-thumping racists who speak in a hickish drawl and won’t eat anything that hasn’t been deep-fried. I keep trying to tell them that they’re thinking of Texas, but they won’t listen!

(Just kidding, Texans … please don’t shoot me with the many, many guns you no doubt own)

In truth, it’s likely that Indianapolis is very similar to Syracuse, and all of the other medium-sized cities in between Chicago and New York (such as Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, etc) — it’s probably got some nice areas, and some not-so-nice areas. It’s probably got a decent amount of culture available. It’s probably got a pretty-enough downtown area that turns into a ghost town after 6pm … it’s just a city. Like many other cities.

It’s not New York, but there are only two, maybe three other cities in this country that can even claim to be close to New York in terms of how much they offer and how huge the city area is. I’ve visited all of the contenders and … they’re not New York either. Nowhere is like New York, which is probably why it’s so expensive here.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to explaining why we’re moving. It’s not purely the expense … people can and do live in this city making less than I make alone, let alone what Charlotte and I make combined (when she has a job). However, she’s having a hard time finding a job, has an awesome lead in Indy, and even if that lead doesn’t pan out, we can live much more easily on my salary alone there, than we can here. It’s less than half as expensive to rent a free-standing, three-bedroom house there, than it is to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.

But even that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that my friend and I are really right on the cusp of launching some pretty cool websites and getting our business up and running. He already lives in Indy, where he telecommutes for Crispy Gamer. If I move there, then we can both work for Crispy during the day, and give our evenings and weekends to getting this thing off the ground. When you combine the ability to do that, with the significant reduction in financial burden that moving to Indy will provide, and it began to look like a no-brainer.

When you combine both those things with the fact that Charlotte is probably going  to grad school in fall 2010 and wants lots of time to spend reading, writing, applying, and working on a BA in french lit for the next year. This will be a lot easier without the distractions that New York provides. Basically we’re both kind of planning on hunkering down for a year, putting our noses to the grindstone, and really pushing hard on a couple of projects. Also, hopefully, we’ll be saving quite a bit of money for when she does go back to school, at which point it’s unlikely she’ll be drawing a steady salary.

So that’s the deal. We’re sorry to be leaving Brooklyn, especially our friends here, but it just makes too much sense not to do it. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, right?

Status Updates

Lose 25 Lbs Project: Current weight: 211 ( -2.5lbs)

Long Hair and Outrageous Muttonchops Project: Still growing the foundation!