What I like: not needing a car (no car payment, no car insurance), any event (concert/meetup/parade/show/etc) is only 20-30 minutes away door-to-door and you don't need to park since you have no car, central park is okay (but it's no red rocks or la honda), you'd think having 6 million people within a 6 mile radius would make it easy to meet people but... not so much, housing prices are (supposedly) less than SF but it's still painful, tons of non-chain places to eat, my 300+ Mbps home Internet access for $80/month, can be at any airport in about 30 to 60 minutes (taxi to LGA or subway+airtrain to JFK or nj transit+airtrain to EWR), etc.

I've done the whole norovirus dance once too. It really does knock you out for a week or two. (I started feeling sick when walking around outside one morning, decided to take the subway back home, the first sickness struck while waiting for the train—I just had to throw up on the subway tracks. Pretty awful. Some nice bystanders gave me an unopened bottle of water they had with them which was nice.)