And the City

I've been having what's known as a "Lost Weekend." Since I don't have HBO, I only know Sex and the City from DVD, and I finally got seasons 5 and 6.1, so I'm catching up, and resting. I've been on the sofa eating, drinking, and watching Carrie and friends.

I am Miranda. I mentioned this to a friend once, who immediately exclaimed, "But you're not a rich successful lawyer!" They think I'm Charlotte, the ever-optimistic, hopeless romantic WASP Episcopalian with a Jew-fetish. But no, trust me: I am Miranda.

No show has ever captured life in New York quite the way SATC does. Not Will & Grace, not Friends, not even Seinfeld. I recognize so much of my own life in these episodes. Granted, a budget-sized version; instead of Prada and Manolo Blahnik I wear Old Navy and Kenneth Cole, when I can find it at Filene's.

But so much of it rings true, from watching that stupid Diane Sawyer video at jury duty (and I, too, called a friend on my cellphone during a break to say the best part of jury duty was shopping at Century 21) to shopping at Zabar's, to running into people you don't want to see at the moment you least want to see them, to those impossibly perfect, fairytale New York evenings. Trust me, they really exist, and just like they're depicted in the show. There is a magic in this city. Sometimes I am utterly enchanted.

The one character I always felt I had nothing in common with was Carrie: too extroverted, too attractive, too able to let her emotional swings out in public, too confident to be me. And too many dates.

Not just dates, but relationships, or, at least, dating relationships that last a whole episode or two. Right now I don't remember the last date I went on. I don't think it was in 2006. The last time I had a boyfriend, Bill Clinton was president. In his first term. Oy.

But it turns out, even Carrie and I have our similarities. She, too, described her relationship with the City as if it were a troublesome boyfriend, and, hitting a dryspell, she joked with her friends that she'd have to change the name of her column to just "And the City," which was the title of a blogpost that's been gestating in my brain for a while now.

And then today, she hit me with this:

"In New York, they say you're always looking for a job, a boyfriend or an apartment. So, let's say you have two out of three. Fabulous. Why do we let the one thing we don't have affect how we feel about the things we do have?"