OK, as long as we're calling Boston the Second Best City, we need to name New York as first best. But this is all a matter of perception. Here it is: Boston only feels like it's a second best city, and that's only because New York is so full of itself. But this perception colors many aspects of Boston life with a sick shade of green. Probably most obnoxious is the Yankees Suck phenomenon, a trend that just exudes inferiority complex. Even though the Yankees do suck, they suck wicked bad. But it goes past Yankees Suck. For some, we cherish Boston in all of its not-New Yorkness. But for others, its just a nonstop bitch session about how they should move to New York because it's so much cooler.

Well, the truth is, New York sucks.

When I talk about New York, I don't just mean Manhattan. Manhattan is probably the worst place on Earth, so for this conversation to even approach meaningful, I include the boroughs and to some extent, Hoboken and Jersey City. It's only fair. When I talk about Boston, I include not only the boroughs of Allston, Southie, JP, etc., but also Cambridge and Somerville. It's just the way it is.

I used to live in Brooklyn and sometimes I miss living in Brooklyn. The reactions I get from telling people I live in Cambridge are way less cool than when I told people I lived in Brooklyn. But I love living in Boston more. I love living in Boston precisely because it's not New York. I'm like an ex-patriot of New York -- I simultaneously hate it and romanticize it. I'm always telling crazy stories about how crazy it was when I lived in that crazy place. But in reality, I would have to be crazy to go back.

New Yorkers -- who mostly come from Connecticut -- are always really defensive around people like me, people who lived there and then left. It's like I can expose the lie, the grand lie that New York is a cool place to live. The first thing they accuse me of is not being able to handle it: "Not everyone can handle living in New York, you know." And yes, I do know. Usually they are talking about the crowds and the pace, which I admit, those things got to me. Stand at Downtown Crossing right at rush hour and think, "Man, this is crowded." Well, there were places and times in the New York subway system that were truly apocalyptic. And everyone was always in a huge fucking rush. And yes, I couldn't handle this, it bothered me. I just couldn't figure out why everyone thought they were so important that they had to hurry everywhere they went. It sucked and it reeked of insincerity.

Darker than these accusations from "New Yorkers" is that I left New York because I was afraid. New York is an intimidating place and its population, pace, and height do their part at making you feel small. But not unsafe. These sissy New Yorkers who accuse you of being afraid, they stick to their sissy, rich neighborhoods like hypocrites. I once walked across Corona Park in Queens, alone, at 3:30 in the morning. I don't know what they are talking about.

One plus that New York has is the subway, which runs all night. And I have nothing to say about that, that fact schools Boston transportation. But in Boston, it only costs a dollar to ride the T. In New York the fare is double that.

Bars in Boston close, for the most part, at 1:00 a.m., although there are places in Cambridge that have a 2 a.m. license. The bars in New York are open later, sometimes much, much later. People always throw this fact around like it's some big deal, and that someone like myself, who spends a lot of time in bars, ought to be impressed. But no one ever mentions is that 9 a.m. comes at the same time in every city. It is ridiculous to suggest that bars being open later allows a noticeable difference in the amount of time one can feasibly spend in a bar. On the weeknights, a human being cannot consistently stay at the bars until 2 in the morning and still make it work consistently on time at 9 a.m. It just won't happen. So this leaves the weekend, two days a week where New Yorkers can stay at their bars until the wee hours of the morning. And what do they do the next day? Sleep until five o'clock, so by the time they get out to the bars, it's midnight, and they need the extra hours. The Boston system is much more refined. Stay out till 2 a.m. on a Friday, and you can still get up at a reasonable hour on Saturday, do what you need to do, show up at your bar around six or seven, and still put in more hours of drinking than most New Yorkers even have the stomach for.

In fact, the "last call argument" is one of the worst arguments there is for New York's supremacy. Boston is the drinkingest city in the New World, everyone here is called Paddy or Mickey and they're all Irish immigrants, or college students. In New York they are Harrington or Lloyd and they work on Wall Street. People in New York can go out all night and not finish a drink. People get trashed in Boston.

And this doesn't even get into the fact that in New York you get the same beer as in Boston for twice the cost.

New York is known for its hip and trendy style, but Boston is the center for education and medicine. Ignoring the obvious question of which do you value more, I'll skip right to the real point: are you more likely to bed a model in New York or a college freshman in Boston? Boston is home to scores of colleges and tens of thousands of college students. And while college-aged boys can be some of the most obnoxious people in the world, they like to party, and we can all agree that college-aged girls are both beautiful and totally in your league.

When I was living in New York, I had no money. Living in Boston, I don't have much money, but in New York I was absolutely destitute. There were days when I had only a can of soup to eat, and I eventually stopped paying rent and the landlord sent goons over to my place to intimidate me into paying. Like I said, I romanticize this time in my life now, but New York is the worst place to be broke because everything is so fucking expensive. I live fairly comfortably in Boston on less money than I had in New York, which almost doesn't make sense. Why do struggling artists flock to the most expensive city in the world when Boston provides the financial freedom to work less than 40 hours and still get by? The point is that anyone who engages in this kind of poor logic, well, I'm glad they don't live in my affordable North Cambridge neighborhood because we probably wouldn't get along.

I had some great times living in New York. But none of those times were spent doing anything inherently New York. The best thing I ever did there (other than move out) was meet a wicked hot girl in an orange dress at a party. And that stuff happens in any city in the world. But the awful things about New York are specific to New York: the thirty-knot winds which blow through Manhattan all winter long, the pretentious assholes always in a huge rush, the extreme juxtaposition of the world's richest people living right next to some of the world's poorest, and the callous indifference. Fuck New York.