This morning I was indulging in a bit of self-flagellation about my writing, or lack thereof, and I remembered something cheqyr said to me some months back.

It was something along the lines of "it doesn't really matter how you write, it's the act of writing that's important."

So who cares if I'm not writing my three pages a day every morning? Oh, right, my inner perfectionist, sitting in her walnut-paneled library with her hair up in a bun and her steel-rimmed glasses.

I saw Shortbus last night. Polymorphous perversion, I think that was the term some L7 headshrinker came up with in the 60s to describe anyone who isn't a candidate for membership with the Family Research Council. Polymorphous couplings, real people having unsimulated sex, the importance of female orgasm, John Cameron Mitchell (of Hedwig and the Angry Inch fame), a script that was developed by the actors themselves and not approved by a ginormous movie studion -- what's not to love?

Watching it made me feel a bit nostalgic, somewhat regretful. Shortbus takes place in New York City, and in typical New Yorker fashion, the characters and indeed the film itself exudes that confident, annoying assurance that New York is indeed the center of the universe. In my 20s, long before 9-11, I had aspirations to move to NYC. The more I got to know the city, though, the more it overwhelmed me. I grew up in a bedroom community about 45 minutes away by Metro North express train, but very rarely took advantage of my proximity. Later, when I was living at the end of the Hudson line, I fell in love with the place. Later, my love for the place evaporated in the cold, hard light of things like the cost of living, especially compared to my earning potential at the time.

I settled on Boston because it had some of New York's cosmopolitan feel but wasn't as intense and sprawling a place to live. Every city has its sprawl -- its purgatorial rings surrounding its juicy center. Boston may not be as big a Tootsie Pop as New York, but you won't break your teeth trying to get to the chewy center.

Sometimes it seems that people's favorite pastime is to dump on this city, though. While I was waiting for the cross-town shuttle in Harvard Square, two folks started in on the old litany of complaints about My Fair City: it's too segregated, the streets don't make sense, it's not as cosmopolitan as New York, bla bla bla bla bla.

Maybe it was the annoying timbre of the woman's voice, maybe it was that I was going to be late for my meeting, maybe I hadn't had enough leafy greens. Maybe it was because I, a white woman who actually enjoys talking to people of different nationalities, had engaged both of these brown-skinned people in conversation only to watch the conversation devolve into a diatribe about how generally inferior my chosen home town is -- and how racist and segregated to boot. Whatever the reason, I got fed up. And I didn't want to keep silent.

"They want it that way," said the pleasant young man (possibly Latino or Pacific Islander) on his way to work in Central Square to the Indian woman on her way to Beth Israel for a cardiac stress test.

"Who is this mysterious they?" I countered. "Did to think that maybe the white people in this city don't want it to be segregated either?"

They looked at me in shock.

"People love to complain about Boston. It really irritates me. I chose to live in this city, not New York. And you did too, apparently. If you hate the place so much, why don't you leave?"

"I don't think that's very fair," countered the woman. "You can't just follow it up with a prescription like that. It's free speech, you know. You don't have to talk to me."

"You're right, I don't. But it is free speech, and I'm free to tell you how annoying it is when people come along and complain about my town. It's not New York City, it's Boston."

"Oh, I love Boston-" said the nice young man, the same nice young man who'd been complaining about the pattern of the streets and the nasty Powers that Be intent on preserving their lily-white neighborhoods. But his attempt at peacemaking got lost in the shuffle. The woman didn't hear me.

"I wish you luck with your appointment," I said, firm, final, trying -- for my own sake, not hers -- to return to some level of cordiality. And stormed off until I was out of earshot.

What does this all have to do with the movie Shortbus? At one point, one of the characters, suffering under the weight of a profession she's grown to hate, agonizes over her predicament.

-What if I don't have enough money to live in the city? Where would I go? Fresno?

I have no strong desire to live in Fresno. But I'm sure that there are people there who make art. There are people all over the world, and there are other cities too. New York is awesome. I know that. It's got things you won't find anywhere else on the East Coast. But it's not the only game in town. Even in Fresno, I'm sure you can find artists and kinksters and perverts. Thanks to the power of the Intartubes, you can probably find them that much faster.

The reason why this issue affects me so much, of course -- the reason why I raised my voice to some poor woman at a bus stop -- is because my relationship with New York is deep, complicated. Long-standing. In another life I may have ended up in Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn. Riverside. In another life I would be able to take mass transit 24 hours a day. Would smell that particular salty-muddy smell of Long Island Sound, the confluence of fresh water and salt, that smell I remember from my childhood. Smell it and live in it, along with the smell of hot dogs and car exhaust and hope and desperation. Would live and work and walk and fight and elbow my way through crowds of people, a different mix of people, brown and blue-black and lily-white and all the lovely tones in between, live in a place where the Boston Irish don't predominate. Live on a grid.

But I don't. I live here, a gentle little city built on cowpaths, a conglomeration of villages still with their separate boundaries, a mass transit system color-coded and sprawling like a web built by a drunk spider. A place where you can drive 20 minutes up the road and go cross-country skiing for $30, or live your whole life jammed up against your neighbors and car-free. A place where gay couples can legally marry, where indy bands and artists thrive and work and play, a place where health care is a right and not a privilege.

But I grew up in the shadow of New York City. It's my white whale. It's a dream I used to have, a fantasy that needed to stay a fantasy. It's someplace I like to visit once or twice a year. It's not my home.

My home is here, with all the web of community and love and memories I've built here for the past decade. My home is here, with Army Guy.

Which is the other reason Shortbus makes me nostalgic. Nostalgia isn't the same thing as memory. Nostalgia filters memories through a pink filter. It erases all the angst and loneliness, all the alienation and uncertainty, and leaves just the glamour, the excitement. The fantasy of youth.

Youth isn't wasted on the young. Only the young have the resilience and the stamina to put up with it. As much as I like to look back fondly on my 20s, I wouldn't relive them.

And I wouldn't re-make the choices I've made. Well, maybe the ones around unsecured debt. But not the lovers, the relationships, the moves, the experiences. I don't regret my wild and crazy past, and I don't regret my commitment to Army Guy.

"I'm afraid you're going to build up a head of steam over all these parts of yourself I'm asking you to give up," he said.

The fact that he even cares about that makes me love him more. He'd never steal the skin of a Selkie. He'd sit on the shore and talk with her until she folded it up of her own free will and tucked it into the thatch of their house.