Sean asked me if I would do a guest post for this blog. He said that he thought it would be a cool thing to do, but I think he was mostly just looking for a day off of writing. Regardless of the reasoning, here I am, writing a blog entry.
While sitting next to a snoring stranger on a plane may seem less than the ideal situation for six in the morning, there was no place I would have rather been at that moment. Looking out the window at the obviously tired and less than happy to have the morning shift American Airlines employees loading luggage onto planes with what seemed to be more force and less finesse, I was equally exhilarated and terrified about my trip to New York. During the course of the flight while most other passengers where trying catch some sleep before arriving in the city that doesn’t do so, I found myself excitingly daydreaming about my weekend in this big, foreign city. Of course I had an idea of what the city was and what I would do there, from my previous brief tenure there a few weeks before and images from 30 Rock, Seinfeld, and almost every romantic comedy I’d seen to fuel my imagination. But mostly where I found my thoughts wandering to was the fact that I was traveling alone; to me that was what was most exciting and scary about this trip. Now, when I say scary I don’t mean it in the sense of being scared of the plane crashing (I mean, I’m more likely to die on the car ride there, right?) or even getting mugged in Central Park (which I feel like is probably a pretty outdated sitcom trope by now) or just being afraid of traveling to the city of 8 million people without my parents to guide me around. It was more terrifying to realize that I’m at the point in my life where I’m capable of traveling to the largest city in America on my own. I did spend the majority of the weekend with my Midwestern New Yorker brother, showing me the best place to get a bagel and the best place to sit and eat said bagel. But while he was at his work helping out citizens, being praised by his coworkers, and having his boss come up with lies about ways to keep him from leaving in a week, I was on my own to explore. It was weird being able to just go out by myself in a place so large and foreign to me that quite frankly I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it. But I’m able to do so. I am able to wander around Central Park, getting slightly lost and passing the same saxophone player at least three times, alone (and eventually making it out to the right side, unfortunately without seeing “the dog,” much to Helen’s dismay). I am able to weave my way through the bustling city sidewalks filled with more people than I’ve ever seen out and about in Plymouth or East Lansing without having the back my dad’s shirt to hang onto. I am able to navigate the Manhattan subway system at three in the morning with a dying phone all by myself. I guess it’s one of those things where I didn’t quite realize I was growing up until I was sitting on that subway train with four other strangers at three in the morning.
I could go on about my trip. I could talk about walking around and talking in Prospect Park with Sean, eating a grilled cauliflower sandwich (which was a very big deal), the roars of excitement in Little Italy when their football team scored a goal, the incomprehensible number of cute dogs I saw. It was only 2 days but felt like 5 (which probably was a result of not sleeping much, but the city supposedly never does so I figured why should I? (Sorry for making that reference twice in this post.)). I guess I’ll end my little guest post by saying how lucky I am to have such an incredible older brother. While I may have rolled my eyes quite a bit when this Michigan boy was telling me that oh, he knows what subway to take, he was just saying some other routes we could take because he knows those, too, I am so fortunate to have him in my life. I may still be completely terrified that without my consent I am in fact growing up, having such an amazing older brother, as Sean is, to look up to makes it just that much less scary.
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