It’s a shocking hour somewhere in the AMs, and I’ve finally finished going through all my stuff. Not the way I went through it when I drove home from college … no, this time “going through it” roughly translates to “throwing every last bit of it away.”

College transcripts? Cool geometry proofs? Notebooks full of emo musings and song lyrics? I guess when you move to New York, you don’t get to keep your old memories. Or maybe they just have to move to your head because you can’t afford the luxury most people have of hanging on the relics of days past.

Well, I hope I never miss you, songs I wrote junior year and exams on which I scored A’s. The city of blinding lights has called, and chances are I might never have remembered you, anyway.

Courthouse Square in Fairfield, Texas.

I love walking. I have long found in it a powerful temporary salvation—a sort of encapsulated, artificial sense of escaping, of departing on a journey and returning having discovered something about the world.

Here comes the obligatory New York reference: this is one more reason I'm going to love my life a whole lot more when I get there. I hate cars. Even the shiny ones that cost millions of dollars. I would be happy to only ever drive a vehicle as a hobby or rare romantic rendezvous—and then only on country roads or vast estates, far from the cluthes of the police.

Today, I was going about my final day at my temporary job, measuring office windows on the downtown square of Fairfield, Texas, for graphics and lettering. Once I finished one side of the square, my last stop was the West—directly across four lanes of TX Highway 84. I didn't notice the upper-90's heat, I was just excited about getting to walk around town for once.

Crossing through the traffic was instictive—I've done it enough all over the place—Washington, New York, Chicago, San Francisco—that I never gave it a second thought. But as I stood, a lone figure on the street corner, I missed my fellow marchers. Truck after SUV after tractor roared by. Enough pedestrians can stop a frantic stream of traffic any day, but here the downtown walker is an alien in a foreign land.

Funny thing is that in a few short months, I'll probably be missing it.

This is a blog about becoming a New Yorker.

Not that moving to New York is in itself all that unusual or special for a 20-something college graduate (you know the saying goes: "every year, thousands move to New York looking for...") Of course I've butchered the context, but the central principle remains intact: hopes, dreams, and ambitions—only slightly less vague than those that accompanied that first roadtrip from home to college—annually inspire hundreds of transplants to the city that never sleeps. "Move-ins" are such a well-worn cliche that real New Yorkers, the ones who prefer the old, dirty Times Square, think the most appropriate welcome is an eye roll and a middle finger. So in one sense, moving to Manhattan in a few weeks hardly makes me special.

It wouldn't, at least, had I not grown up the very thing widely regarded as the New Yorker's polar opposite and cultural nemesis: a Texan.

Of course, I was "not a typical Texan," a phrase one freshman-year roommate always tacked onto the end of my name as if he had ever met an individual of said variety. But I did live in a town of under 5,000 for the first nineteen years of my life—a town where I raised animals, spoke with a twang, and did not always view footwear as an essential element of my attire. Somehow, I grew up a reasonably well-educated member of society, able to speak correctly and dress myself. And now, to my friends and relatives' mixture of pride and skepticism, I am about to become an elated citizen of New York City.

So the next few months of my life will be dedicated to personally defining the term "New Yorker." Every one does it. The beauty about being a move-in in a city of 8 million, where every strain of world culture collides, is that everyone else is really a move-in, too. Unlike my little Texas town, where you can live 20 years and still be an outsider if you can't manage to marry into an "original" family.

What makes a New Yorker? I tend to think they're born, not made, but maybe I'll find out otherwise. Yankees' catcher Jorge Posada says it's "surviving the city." Kate White, editor of Cosmopolitan, says it's "their tempo—the speed at which they live their life." Comedian Amy Sedaris says it's "paying $2,000 for a one-bedroom apartment." But playwright Itamar Moses has my favorite: "being here with no return ticket."