The view from my window is Harlem.

Take a wild guess where I’m living this summer. (pause) YES! You’re right. New York City. The Big Apple. The City That Never Sleeps.

Empire City. You get the idea. I’m here for an internship with Time Inc. and living at Columbia University.

I’ve been here for about two weeks now, and I’ve brought some lovely Northeast Ohio weather with me. It’s rained here every damn day and that’s just inconvenient when I have to walk everywhere. (I shouldn’t whine though . New York City always gets the “W” when it competes against Kent in the “More Exciting Place To Live” contest.)

In preparation for my big move to the Big Apple, I constantly listened to “New York, New York.” If you don’t know who sang that song, stop reading my column now. My current life is essentially equal to the lyrics in that song. However, New York also has its crappy moments too.

Here’s where it kind of looks like, I’m posting my personal ad on eHarmony.com.

Likes:

• The Back Room on the Lower East Side. Yes, I would love my beer in a paper bag and my liquor in tea cups as I pretend I live during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s.

• My roommates. And even though I have to share one bathroom with boys (ew, cooties), they always make me laugh.

• Getting Time Inc.’s magazines for free. I can keep up on my weekly Gosselin family gossip and the crisis in Iran via free People and Time magazines, among others.

• The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). I get to see Jackson Pollock and Van Gogh paintings any time I want. Be inspired.

• Strand bookstore. Screw Borders and Barnes & Noble.

Dislikes:

• The subway in general. Yes, it’s convenient. No, I would rather not see rats every morning or have to transfer 80 times just to get from Morningside Heights to the Village.

• People who come to a dead stop in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of me. I need some sort of bumper contraption because I am constantly slamming into these people.

• Everything costs approximately $1 million more here than in Ohio.

• SoHo on the weekends. Because I no longer consider myself a tourist, I am therefore better than all the tourists here. I am above having to deal with these throngs of people shopping at the outdoor mall that is essentially SoHo.

• Homeless people. No, not the people themselves, just the fact that they’re homeless. My heart aches for them every day.

• Coney Island. There are trash cans literally every four feet and there’s still garbage and shards of glass everywhere.

OK, OK, I promise I won’t bore you in this lovely space on the Forum page every other week with random shenanigans from my city life. (If you absolutely have to know what I’m doing in the city at any given moment, follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/KD_kent360. Shameless self-promotion.)

But, wherever you may be living this summer, my life is probably more exciting than yours anyway, especially if you’re stuck in Kent, Ohio.

Kristina Deckert is a senior information design major and columnist for the Summer Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her tweets.