I love this city.

I love driving past the bull with my windows down late on an October Tuesday after not doing too terribly in my regular poker game down on Wall Street. You can't do that anywhere else in the world, and I love it, everything about it. I love walking down the middle of Wall Street, even if its blocked off to anything but pedestrian traffic for sadly necessary reasons. It feels like the safest part of town, with the cops walking around with machine guns strapped to their chests.

I love paying six dollars to drive through a tunnel every time I don't feel like riding the train/bus into the city. I love the myriad wonders of the subway.

I love the free metered spots on a Sunday morning when I'm headed to church and the general shopping public isn't even awake yet. I love the leaders and kids of my youth group and our regular Domino's habit. I love Central Park on Sunday afternoon when its filled with locals and tourists blending more seamlessly than anywhere else in the city at any other time.

I love my church.

I love not being a Yankee fan, and I love that anywhere you go here you will always run into co-fans of your out-of-state team, because 90% of the people here are from somewhere else anyway. Even at Yankee stadium in October. I love Steeler Sunday afternoons in Hell's Kitchen.

I love discovering a bar in the back of a restaurant on Bleeker that sells ridiculously low-price top-shelf drinks. I love taking a girl to a swanky little dinner joint secretly tucked at the end of an alley in SoHo. I love breakfast at the Hollywood diner near Union Square at 3 in the morning. I love haggling with taxi drivers over the fare back to Hoboken at 4 in the morning. I love knowing the secret best entrances to the Lincoln from 33rd and 31st streets.

I love the Cloisters, and I love my Winslow Homers that they keep in the Met. I love brunch in Chelsea, the Chelsea Market, golfing off the Chelsea Piers, and pretty much every bar I've found in the West Village.

I love Grand Central and the Theory employee store hidden near the library. And I love running into movie / tv shoots on a regular basis, not to mention seeing celebs crossing 5th Ave for a jog in the park, looking like we all look when we wake up to exercise.

I love the pizza here, and the constant availability of food and drink.

And I love that there are so many other people who live here and love all these things and more with me.

(Read: don't see myself leaving soon, even if I am starting to look at going back to school. Dilemma.)