I love this city, I love the diversity and the noise and the chaos, and meeting the most amazing people and seeing the most amazing things, and always feeling like you're on a tight rope hovering between sanity and total craziness. But what I love the most is how at the end of the day you can close all that out behind your apartment door, sit on your couch with your husband and dog, watch TV and be just like anyone else sitting on their couch every night too--anywhere in the world.

(cont!) Since my husbands schedule is always so sporatic, he has off during days I'm at work, so it'd be nice to spend more time with him. And go to movies on a Tuesday afternoon on a whim. Start Happy Hour at 4! Try all of those restauarants that we could never afford. There's just so much. I moved here with a list a mile long of things I had to do in New York before I moved away-but now that we're not moving away, it seems I've lost track of the excitement of first being here--I would get back to that. I'd pull out my list and get back to everything New York has to offer. You could wake up every morning here with the intent of doing something new that day, and live for decades doing it.

Of course, every New Yorker (barring the billionaires) daydream about what fun they could have with all this city has to offer if you didn't have the job and financial responsibilities tying you down. One day I took off work to go to the Opera in the middle of the day-and everyone there looked like they didn't have a care in the world. These are the things I'd do more. I'd have an apartment in the West Village, I'd have long leisurely lunches, hit art galleries, go to more shows, really get to know the museums, volunteer more, get more active in the local politics.

I live here now! In fact, in the neighborhood of the W - and my husband is a firefighter at Ground Zero a few blocks away, so I'm so happy you're shining a bit of a spotlight on the hard-hit area (post-9/11) down here. Of course, we don't live in a 30th floor hi-rise. We live in a studio apartment in a walk-up building, we scrounge for money to pay our absurd rent, and sacrifice a lot of the comforts I had and loved growing up in Missouri. But--we love every minute of NYC life. It was always my dream to live in the Big Apple, I wrote in a highschool diary my 10-year goal and it was "Live in NYC, work in advertising, live in a big loft downtown." (two out of three ain't bad!)