The MTA, once again, is hitting the little people (no, not dwarves, per se; regular, everyday folks) where it hurts the most: our wallets.

They aren’t hiking the fares again, not just yet, but jacking up the price of a Metrocard is but one way to deplete the ridership’s funds. By curbing essential bus and train service, the MTA is denying New Yorkers the opportunity to easily travel to where is the best (perhaps this should be in quotes … read: highest paying) — or only — available job.

I know people who commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx because the latter borough is where they found work, despite that they already lived in Kings County and therefore could not easily relocate closer to work; nothing locally or in Manhattan availed itself to them, so they took what did.

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I’ve never really lived anywhere else than in the area of New York City. I spent a few summers in the bucolic Upstate countryside, four years amidst the flat nothingness of mid-Michigan … but I spent an entire childhood and adolescence amidst the flat nothingness of anti-urban-but-not-quite-rural Long Island only 38 miles from Manhattan, and have now spent close to a decade in Brooklyn.

New York, when I was a kid, was the place where my dad worked and where the Rangers played hockey. It was the place where my poster of John McEnroe walking through a smut-filled Times Square was photographed. But I had no concept of the city as a grand and dangerous place. It was Barclay Street and Madison Square Garden. For a long time.

The nature of this place in the ’80s was lost on me because I was never permitted to be subjected to its vagaries — except to witness what seeped into my limited locales. Unlike the cougar I dated who romped and stomped through the Lower East Side in the Koch years, I was watching Thundercats and Transformers in a cookie-cutter house out east.

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I didn’t grow up in the confines of the Greater City of New York, but just outside of it. It was the place in which I aspired to live since my first visit to the American Museum of Natural History. I thought it would be the coolest thing to not have to take the LIRR or drive to see the dinosaurs. And there was a park right across the street. How novel.

When I went away for school, I pined for New York City. When I came back to it’s suburbs during breaks from classes, I would always make at least one trip in to eat some pizza or just walk the streets. When I got closer to graduation, I decided I’d move to Brooklyn when I got my degree. Flatbush was the neighborhood I thought to be quintessentially Brooklyn, even though I’d never been there. To be honest, I’d never been to Brooklyn before I moved here. I just thought it was edgier — more fringe — than bland, sterilized and Disney-fied Manhattan. I wanted to be somewhere with true grit and character, that was still authentic. I wound up living right on 4th Avenue at Pacific Street.

The digs were tiny and it was a sublet, so after a few months, it was out of there and onward to a place in Cobble Hill on the cusp of Bedford-Stuyvestant. Less than a year there before a move to a sweet one-bedroom near the Museum. A little more than a year there before a break-up forced me out.

Still no Flatbush. Honestly, the idea of living there had left my mind. It wasn’t a conscious thing; I just stopped thinking about it. At some point, certain places in Brooklyn became too far away. As much as I wanted to avoid living in Manhattan, I judged parts of Brooklyn based on their proximity to New York County. I was working on that island, afterall, and I didn’t want to need an hour to commute.

I wound up in Park Slope, living with strangers for roommates for the first time. It lasted two months before I was forced out by three people, one of whom pissed in cups rather than use the communal bathroom and the other two who each owned one species of rodent or another. It didn’t break me up too bad that I’d been evicted; what a bunch of freaks. But what a pain in the ass.

So, I moved down the street into Gowanus, into an utter hovel of a shithole apartment, but it was cheap and my room was enormous. Landlords we’re totally racist, stereotypical cocks (they had the nerve to call my girlfriend a “mulignan”) but my new roommate seemed cool, if off-color. Still, as the year wore on that situation soured. Me and the roommate kept totally different hours, had little in common and it became a passively aggressive nightmare of resentment and uncomfortability.

I moved again, into a place with the girlfriend whose race my landlords maligned, into Bed-Stuy. Another of those neighborhoods I believed typified Brooklyn. Its gorgeous brownstones and tree-lined streets were the stuff of movie scenes, but the realities of gunfire every night and the shit-strewn streets, the vomitous low-rent retail hell of Fulton Street made living there less of a dream and more of a sentence.

That relationship ran its course and again I had to move out. After two years in the Stuy I found a place in Flatbush.

Thus far, I dig the neighborhood. It’s very insular. Most people on the street are ebullient as opposed to the Stuy’s angry and aggressive sociopathy. It’s near the park. It’s got a Duane Reade and a Family Dollar (so did Bed-Stuy, but these are closer). I’ve got three trains to choose from instead of one (the G really didn’t count as an option). But now my commute to work utterly blows. As crap as the A-train was, it connected to the train that put me right under the building where I work. My commute was, tops, 35 minutes except on disaster days. Now, it’s 45 minutes (that’s a miracle) to an hour.

I sometimes think I’d be better of living on Long Island, or forking out this kind of dough to live with a roommate somewhere closer to the city, but then I realize that on LI gas would cost me hundreds a month and the LIRR would be a few more hundred. Insurance for the car, etc. and I’d be paying close to 500 plus just to get around. Why not just stay in New York and at least be somewhere walkable? And living with someone? No way. I’ve proven that I can’t. The money I spend to live alone is as well-spent as a good investment.

Despite her place in the curriculum of courses I took, I never read any Virginia Woolf, but I do believe she said something about needing a room of one’s own. I’ve got three (not including the bathroom). And they’re all mine.

It’s a nice feeling.

So, I’m in Flatbush digging everything except my commute.

It could really be a lot worse.