I was biking the Summer Streets in NYC yesterday (excuse the sweaty photo), and look who I ran into!

This is Wind-Up Hello Kitty, a cast bronze statue by artist Tom Sachs on display in the courtyard of Lever House (Park Avenue and 53rd Street). Sachs’ other works in this exhibit include Miffy and Kitty fountains—water pours from the eyes, which I find a little disturbing—and a 10-foot My Melody sculpture.

From a 5/4/08 NY Times article:

“Even as an artist I get caught up in the grind of running a small business and keeping things going,” Tom Sachs said, discussing a 21-foot-tall bronze Hello Kitty that rises up behind the fountains at Lever House. “This windup Hello Kitty is an expression of how automated my life can feel sometimes. Maybe that’s why she’s the biggest one in the show and looks like she’s about to fall over.”
Read article…

Though I don’t know how I feel about “crying” Hello Kitty, it was certainly the cutest rest stop! (In second place came the irresistible kids giving out cupcakes and lemonade, collecting donations for New Orleans. A distant third goes to the mule at the Juan Valdez coffee stop.)

I know this is probably posted everywhere on Sanrio-related blogs, but I feel I am required to make note of it, too!

Hello Kitty made her Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade debut this year.

I had a call from my mom when the balloon appeared on tv, “Just wanted to make sure you saw Hello Kitty. Ok, bye!”

I was picked up by this cab one night in Brooklyn. I’d not ever heard of Oleg the “Human Computer” before, but it’s always fun to gain first-hand experience with NYC personalities. He did indeed correctly tell me the day of the week I was born (after giving him the date). Impressive… However, he was a bit overbearing - kind of didn’t want to let us out - and expected an extra-big-fat tip.

I celebrated the Fourth of July as I have for the past several years, camping out on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and watching the fireworks. It rained, but it was worth it.

Afterwards, I had the group back for cupcakes and cocktails at my place. One friend commented that my apartment was not the Hello Kitty shrine he expected. I don’t know if he was disappointed or relieved.

I took this quiz in the most recent Time Out New York. I apparently got “old” points for having been to Starshine Burlesque recently, but somehow I ended up about a decade younger than my real age.

My New York age is 21

New Yorkers, take the Time Out quiz here.

I’ve heard it said before that New Yorkers live a little “young,” and I’m certainly living a different kind of life than people I grew up with…in general. I’m single, have no children, and rent my home. This is not too unusual for someone my age in New York. Most of my friends who live anywhere other than NYC are married, have kids, own a house, and/or are involved in other very grownup things. My Louisiana friends, for example, started getting married more than 10 years ago, New York friends started getting hitched just a couple of years past. Not that marriage is necessarily an indicator of adulthood, but I find interesting the fact that it generally happens later here. Many NYC friends of mine who are my general age are, however, working like crazy and doing amazing things at work or in grad school. (As are others elsewhere, I’m not trying to say we are all one way or the other.)

So it’s not that we NYers are partying like 21 year olds until we’re 50—I mean, not ALL the time. And if we don’t own homes, it’s because NYC real estate is horribly, depressingly expensive, not because of any lack of maturity. My theory on some of it, hinted at above, is that a lot of New Yorkers (and other big cities, just talking about what I know here) seem to be getting very involved in their careers or going back to school for advanced degrees before deciding to permanently attached themselves to a significant other or consider having kids. I think this is a general trend for our generation, but it’s perhaps more extreme in NYC.

What makes you OLD or YOUNG? I’m sure others might disagree, but in my mind it centers on where you are with your career, if you are married or in an equivalent relationship, if you have children, if you own a home. Of course, you can have all of that and more and still be young at heart. That’s not exactly what I’m talking about here, but it’s part of what Time Out is probably getting at with its quiz.

It’s all how you look at it, of course. A friend of mine who lives in Texas who has been married for several years and is due with her second child this summer recently said to me, “Wow, you have your own business. How grown up!”

I laughed, but she’s not all wrong.

I guess to me, you are more of a “real” adult when you have to raise a child yourself. (There was an article last year I personally found interesting, about the consequences of waiting on the kid issue, at least for women, “Stop Time” in New York magazine.) For others it is something like owning a business or having a high-powered job or whatever. Maybe none of us feels like a “grown up,” because we always see what someone else is doing as being much more adult than anything in our own lives.

And, really, who actually admits to wanting to grow up?