It's Up To You, New York

He said that if he could make it there, then he could make it anywhere. He didn't say how, or why, but Frank Sinatra was sure that this was the case in his New York, New York. And even if, like him, we can't just wake up in the city that doesn't sleep and find that we're king of the hill (top of the heap), our New York, New York is still that place that provides success' ultimate measuring device. But "making it" here is also harder, and, unlike anywhere else, doesn't rely on just the usual factors like fortune, fame, or even name recognition. So why do we want to, and what does it mean to ultimately "make it" in the city that both represents opportunity and struggle?

If everyone who moved to New York didn't believe Frank's words, they wouldn't be here. If everyone who didn't live in New York didn't believe this, they wouldn't be expecting everyone they knew here to publish a book or land a starring role in Rent. That prototype of the New Yorker in the media, of creative and corporate excellence that comes off effortlessly yet neurotically, somehow drives all of us to want to be a part of it. Ideally, however, this high point comes from the good kind of ambition, where work means more than making a living but less than making a fortune.

Joan Didion, in her famous essay "Goodbye To All That," wrote: "It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young." And indeed, the very young crowd the cubicles and the night clubs and the single-room apartments because we have come here with the optimism-the hope-that this is the place that will let us be who we want to be and let us pursue that identity while making a career out of it. "Aspiring" becomes the most common self-descriptive adverb, and the city provides enough outlets to let those aspirations freely find their place. In our insular collegiate lives, our profession and every job we wish to have one day are ideals (however extreme they may be) not yet tainted by the responsibility to earn an income and pay a rent.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Chuck Klosterman do a reading of his fourth book at a Barnes and Noble in Chelsea. Regardless of whether even half the people reading this have ever heard of Chuck Klosterman, he is one of my favorite writers of all time, and someone I've idealized into what I hope to be like one day. He is a pop-culture analyst, and has written hundreds of pieces for SPIN, Esquire, The New York Times magazine, etc. His most famous book, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, can be found in any airport bookstore and is one of those hip books that young people have to read these days. He represents that guy who got here one day, and wanted to write, and did it well. What honestly freaked me out, though,` is that he got to New York (from North Dakota) in the year 2000, which means that all of this writing, all of his magazine positions and published books and public appearances and journalists calling him "the voice of our generation" have been a product of the years between my freshman year of high school and now. Six years. That's it. So, since over one hundred people showed up to that Barnes and Noble book reading, I could say he's made it-even if I have no idea how many books he's sold or even if he supposedly got fired from his job at SPIN.

Of course it's not all about the job title, or the fame. Of course I realize that's not what's important. But it's worth it to see how much it's implicit in all we do, and how strange it is for us, caught in the middle of the academic pursuits and the ambition to feel accomplished in the outside world. One could say we have an advantage, because we've already arrived. We've already gotten hooked up with some internships; some of us are even already acting and writing and teaching in the real city already. But we might also be some of the only people in New York who aren't here only because this is the place to be to get ahead, since we're purposefully here to get an education.

Working here is about making more than just a living, about reaching some sort of official place in the occupational hierarchy that our parents and friends at home can recognize as having somehow made it. But the difficulty is that the danger of not making it is incredibly threatening only because its opposite is so highly valued and expected. If it weren't so, if making it here was just the same as making it anywhere, then perhaps the race to success wouldn't so overwhelming, and maybe we wouldn't even be trying.

In an interview entitled "Making It In New York: Jeff Buckley," the singer, who arrived in New York with only a guitar and a bunch of songs and got signed by Columbia Records only two years later, offers a perfect description of how, exactly, one can make it. "The only way to really make it, anywhere" he says, "is to put every bit of your being into the thing that only you can provide. The only angle is the art that you choose, that only you can provide. And to do that, you have to be quiet for a long time and find out what you bring forth ...It's totally subjective. You're just given the task of bringing it up." Well, it might not be this poetic, but we can definitely try.