On my way to the bank near my office building the other day, I passed a block that looked really familiar and I couldn’t figure out why (not having walked down it since I started this job). On my way back, I realized that it’s because it contains the hotel I stayed at when I first came to visit NYU as a prospective student. That would have been during the spring of 1998 or the fall of 1999. It was only my second visit to the city (the first being a weekend spent here when I was knee high to a grasshopper), and I didn’t realize then that the entire city doesn’t look like the financial district. I couldn’t have realized that five years later the financial district would still look totally bizarre to me. But I ended up moving here anyway, so it can’t have been that alarming, even to a seventeen-year-old ubergoth.