NYC Nomad Has Lots Of Baggage

If the decadence of the '20s was characterized by jazz-age consumption, the '50s by rampant consumerism, and the '80s by drug use, the decadence of this generation is fueled by youth self-indulgence. The 2010s are an age of self-gratifying, liberal-arts overload;  of well-to-do Westerners who wish to grace the developing world with their graciousness and the blogosphere with their trendiness and "authenticity"; of young adults who seem to be more self-aware than ever. Sure, nobody could have been more "artistically" self-absorbed than John Keats and his Romantic cohorts, but at least they didn't have Twitter and tumblr with which to update their dew-worshipping friends every 5 seconds.

Unfortunately, Ed Casabian does. This 29-year-old, who calls himself "The NYC Nomad" on his spiffy tumblr blog (http://thenycnomad.tumblr.com/), was just featured in the Times for his intrepid couch-surfing (er, air-mattress-placing) New York lifestyle. Having chosen to forego conventional adulthood after a disastrous breakup with a girlfriend of 7 years, Mr. Casabian starting moving to a different apartment every Sunday, spanning the boroughs and social stratospheres, all the time sustaining his job as a web financial analyst at a company that sounds mysteriously like Digg. He stays with friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends -- whoever will take him in -- and documents each stay in neat little pictures of him and his new buddies doing hipster-friendly activities in cute little settings. He even uses the blog to solicit for places to stay -- and to gloat about finally making it into the Times (of course, by ridiculing him I'm just helping to expand his media reach, but hey: his name, when circulating around YuppieHipster world, will no doubt garner enough Google hits to put me on the radar, too). So let's soldier on.

Mr. Casabian, who hails from Massachusetts (no doubt from behind the Tofu Curtain), claims to have fallen into his current way of life after leaving the co-op that he and his girlfriend bought, and riding his bike around Central Park in a wave of depression. Then, in a bout of spunky post-adolescent exuberance known only to the likes of highschoolers and Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, he decided not to settle down anywhere and chose a "nomadic" (::cringe::) life instead.

Of course, Mr. Casabian has had his fair share of "look how much I endure to be free spirited in the big city" moments, many of which are all too embarrassing. At one point he asked the company that manufactures the air mattress he carries around to "sponsor" him on his journeys, and the proposition was declined (News Flash: most respectable money-making institutions, unlike the New York Times, are not willing to enable the idiot shenanigans of overgrown hipsters who are "finding themselves" in ways that no normal people have enough time or money to do -- or for that matter, would ever want to). Second, he was able to use one very temporary Central Park South address to pick up a girl uptown, only to be refused a second date when he moved soon after to a "not so chic" spot in Queens (Why he assumes it was his living locale -- and not his clear unwillingness to grow up -- that turned her off is beyond me).

But in the end, Ed Casabian is not our everyday bike-loving NYC-dwelling hipster extraordinaire who brags about his BoHoNomadic lifestyle on the Internet. He's more of... well... an emo kid. I started this post with the purpose of expressing my contempt for the infuriating self-indulgence involved in the NYC Nomad's desire to document his childhood romp through the boroughs. But now, I am left not wanting to say "Boo Fucking Hoo," but just a regular old "Boo Hoo," for real. Ed Casabian, it seems to me, is a manchild on the run from any kind of stability, stunning hosts with an "uncanny ability to fall asleep in weird places," and leaving the overall impression of a lost, homeless puppy. Cearly unable to get his life together after a longterm relationship turned sour, he seems to be clinging at best to a strange persona that I'm not sure he's even cocky enough to uphold. To me, it's apparent that he devised this media-bait homelessness scheme primarily to get noticed by the hipster blogospohere and the ever-pandering Times. More than reviling or fury-fueling, his story is just ...pathetic.

Find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/nyregion/13nomad.html?_r=1