5/11/2014

I am probably not the first person to say this, but the trip through Queens helped strip the veneer off the whole thing.  I am still wrapping my head around the fact that New York exists at all.  In my head, it has always occupied an almost mythic place, next to Atlantis and Metropolis, the archetypal “City,” capital C.  It’s not just a matter of scale separated it from Chicago or Detroit--it’s an entirely different plane of existence.

Taking the el to the Mets’ stadium helped drag this city back to earth.  Above ground, looking through windows, it was possible to see this place as it really is.  And it wasn’t too desperately unfamiliar.   The tightly packed single family housing felt like Chicago.  The dilapidated industrial buildings felt like good old Michigan.  The whole thing fell into a scale I felt I could comprehend.

Manhattan feels like an entirely foreign entity, and it makes this city easy to mythologize.  It is defined in extraordinarily grandiose terms, each with implications that reach far beyond what a city can normally hope to imply.  The Empire State Building is the archetype for skyscraper.  The Manhattan skyline is the archetype for skyline.  The Statue of Liberty is the archetype for freedom itself!  Even its street names conjure up images far beyond the brick and mortar and steel that line them.  Wall Street is finance, is shorthand for big business.  Madison Avenue is advertising, shorthand for manipulation.  Broadway is theatre, shorthand for entertainment.

But Queens was very clearly just a place where people lived their lives, went to work, raised their kids.  Seeing it laid out helped remind that Manhattan is too, actually, that this whole place is just another patch of land where humans have decided to make a go of it.  This is a special place.  There is no doubt about that.  But it’s a real place, not a movie set.  For all New Yorkers say about being the “greatest city in the world,” it’s really just a city, and cities are made of people, not buildings.  There is a special mass of humanity here, but that’s just as there is literally everywhere else.

(Also, the Mets are lousy.)

5/10/2014

My room has a nice view of the street, of a gorgeous old church and an always-occupied basketball court.  This is nicer than a view of the six feet separating our building from the next one over or the barbed-wire fenced courtyard, but there is a price to be paid for this luxury:  In order to see if the bathroom is available, I have to walk through the kitchen and peer down the hallway.  These six steps have caused nothing but trouble.  For while I am usually pretty good about social situations--I have no problem calling takeout, for example, and can ask for directions unashamedly--I am sometimes irrationally shy, and this type of journey is exactly what sets that anxiety off.  

Now, most of the time, this is no problem at all.  There’s no one in the kitchen and the bathroom door is open and I can complete the circuit without having to perform for anyone.  But I find myself inventing all sorts of other reasons that I might need to leave my room anyway, just in case someone is in the kitchen and sees me turn around after the bad news of the occupied bathroom is discovered.  It is safe to say that I have done more than my fair share of dishes--the sink being a beautiful place to stand and wait for that glorious sound of the humidity-swelled bathroom door thunking open.  (The last few bites of cereal take an exorbitant amount of time for the same reason.)

But the journey truly can be treacherous.  Wearing my short shorts and t-shirt and needing desperately to pee and to shower, I was confronted by a roommate whose name I don’t think I’ve forgotten, I think I never knew it to begin with.  “Sean,” she said, “do you have an iPhone 5?” --she needed to borrow a cable.  I was happy to lend it to her, but less happy to realize I’d forgotten to come up with a plan for retrieving it.  This would have been relatively simple if I knew her name--to any of the roommates, I could ask, “Hey, have you seen Anna?” or “Do you know if Catherine is around?”  But you know how it goes.  Instead, I had to hope I would bump into her on my way to the bathroom while my phone’s battery hurdled toward zero--the same path the got me into this mess was my only route of it.

5/9/2014

As he was leaving, he got on one knee and he looked at me with a very respectable imitation of intimacy.   “Look,” he said, “these are some very wealthy people who have the potential to help the university out in a number of ways.  If it felt like I was using you as a prop, it’s because I was using you as a prop.  You were good at it, too, so thanks.”

The associate vice-president of rich person handholding gladhanded away through the live auction portion of the dinner, the part where wealthy alumni proved to one another how truly wealthy they are but shouting out larger and larger numbers for less and less valuable things.  The signed volleyball was not worth $1000, but the right to yell, “$1000” in response to a signed volleyball certainly was.  Besides, it was for a good cause, it’s contributions like these that ensure that the university has enough money to continue to send its administration on such important trips as this one.  You make them feel important for having gone to your school and in return they make you feel important for going there.  $3200 dollars for a wine party it is, then.

I found myself smiling around the punchlines, laughing at and not with people.  The transparency of the whole thing was incredible to me.  We pretend that the wealthy are classy, that’s where we get the word even, but there’s nothing especially civilized about a dick-measuring contest, whether the units are inches or thousands of dollars.  This devolved into that so quickly, though, before they even got to the auction, with every introduction featuring vacation homes in Vermont and first-class flights to Europe.  Above the urinal there was a sign saying this was one of the best ten steakhouses in the nation, with the asterisk leading to a list that lacked its name.  This didn’t feel like an accident.

The financier I sat next to was transparently unhappy.  He paid an awful lot of money for the right to sit at the table he was sitting at but it really didn’t seem to be bringing him joy--instead he told an undergraduate about how annoying it is to commute in from New Jersey and how colleges really ought to teach kids how to think.  That’s what he’d paid for, really--for someone to pretend that his Hallmark graduation card advice was beautiful and life changing.  He got what he wanted, I guess.  But I was the knife with the blade that retracts into itself, I was the static television of an IKEA kitchen, I was the plastic piece of fruit with a bite already taken out of it:  A pretty good prop, maybe, but let’s not pretend it was the real thing.

5/8/2014

Elderly women find me charming, that’s a key takeaway from my first few days here.  Some combination of my youth, my out-of-townness, my patience, and my boyish good looks seems to have found me a way into the hearts of even the most cantankerous old ladies.  I have evidence of this:  They ask me the question they were too afraid to ask the person in charge, pulling me in in hushed tones, “Do you think you could get me a flier about this?”  They compare me to their grandchildren, some of whom are also named Sean and most of whom resemble at least some aspect of my being.  They love that I am not from around here--I do not correct them when they talk approvingly to one another about my midwestern charm, ”He looks like he’s right off a farm.”

I discovered all this on accident the other night.  I was just supposed to bring a box of literature over to the senior center down the block for a presentation on senior housing.  When we got there, it was a madhouse--the correct room had not been booked, the speakers were unwilling to talk in anything other than hushed tones, the woman in charge of the whole thing was old enough to qualify herself and was not especially sympathetic of the concerns of the people she was there to serve.  All this complicated the delivery job, meant that I spent two hours there, checking on these old women’s place in line to see a lawyer and arranging fliers and manning the check-in desk.  

The other key takeaway was that I didn’t mind at all, and not just because, as I (in retrospect annoyingly modestly) said to my boss, “I don’t really have anything else to do.”  I find them charming, too.  The fact that they radiate affection towards me helps, but there is something more to it than that.  I have only began to comprehend the extraordinary odds so many of them face.  Their housing situation determines their entire livelihood.  They are trapped by a fixed income, entirely dependent on their regulated rent.  Landlords can exploit so many different tactics--some illegal and others simply slimy--to ruin them and capitalize on their downfall.  The circumstances these women--and they are mostly, although by no means exclusively, women--find themselves in would make you want to tear your hair out.  Landlords calling them at all hours of the night, telling them to leave or they’ll throw them out, turning their heat off in the middle of winter, refusing to cash their checks and then suing them for late payment.  I am not ordinarily an angry person, and I won’t pretend that this has me seething or stomping around or yelling.  But it is hard for me to conceptualize anything more profoundly unfair than the situation these women have been placed in.

Yet here they are, waiting, patiently or not so patiently, in line to see a lawyer who might just be able to help them, and complimenting my blond hair while they wait.  

5/7/2014

I took unfamiliar subway lines to get to an unfamiliar part of town, and to tell the truth I loved it.  The process of meeting friends is a very active one here.  It involves train stations and transfers and jaywalking and jogging.  It’s active mentally, too--navigation is required, manipulations of cognitive maps and intentional direction of working memory.  (That last part is key, because your phone is by then on its deathbed and there’s not much you can do other than let it die peacefully at home in your pocket, surrounded by loved ones.)  The point is that there is an exhilaration in getting to your friends, not just in whatever you do once you get there.

Once you get there, in fact, it feels about the same as anywhere else.  When I walked into Joe’s Ginger, the Chinatown restaurant on an obscure side street I had so exerted myself to find, and took my seat at the Wayne Szalinski boysz’s table, the location was suddenly irrelevant.  It was not a distinctly New York City hangout--it was just me and my friends, hanging out before a show, the same way we’ve done so many times before.

This has the potential to turn into something horrible and cliche about friendship and home, so I don’t want to drag it out too long, but let me say this:  There is something to this idea that friendship is not geo-tagged.

5/6/2014

Three days into the trip is a little bit early to have developed brand loyalty, but Absolute Bagels on Broadway between 107th and 108th is important to me, and it is important to me for reasons beyond how good their lox spread is.  Don’t get me wrong--the lox is very, very good--but I am forced to admit that by any objective measure, it is unlikely that Absolute Bagels is truly the best bagel place in town.  If subjected to a blind taste test, I’m sure there are a thousand places as good if not better.  This is New York City, after all, and bagel provision does not suffer from lack of competition..

So how to explain my fierce loyalty to Absolute Bagels?  It’s not stubbornness, not exactly anyway.  If I were really resistant to trying new things, I wouldn’t be here at all--Einstein Bagels on Ann Arbor Road in Plymouth, now that’s familiar and safe.  But it’s not entirely removed from stubbornness, either.  See Absolute Bagels was the first place I went to in this city, last year on spring break.  While Faith and Andrew slept off a hard day’s vacation, I joined the commuter crowd and walked north on Broadway, confident I was fooling everyone.  When I managed to order without messing up--unlike, I fondly remember, the guy with the thick New York accent who went before me--I was over the moon.  I was still a kid in the city, but for a moment, I wasn’t so glaringly so.

Returning this morning had the same appeal.  This island is designed to smoke the visitor out, to expose those who don’t belong.  The consequences for being outed aren’t especially terrible--I rather like being labeled a midwesterner for holding the door open, actually.  But there is something seductive about camouflaging yourself, about slipping loose of the guidebooks and the tourist maps and the Excuse me, Misters.  Even if it’s only for a moment, even if it’s only while purchasing bagels.

5/5/2014

I got there an hour and a half early, which should not be confused for being well-prepared:  The truth is, I had absolutely no clue what to do.  I was supposed to meet my boss on the steps of City Hall, which sounds easy enough, except for the barricades and the armed guards aimed at preventing you from doing exactly that.  But adulthood requires dealing with such uncertainties, and so there I went, explaining my confusion to an actually extraordinarily sympathetic security guard.  There was a certain amount of pride that came with standing on the steps of City Hall, just as I’d been asked although not quite instructed.