what New York has done to me

• I find comfort in checking the weather and, if I’m riding the train, the MTA Web site before leaving home in the morning. I could get along with just that much news. But...I don’t.


• I have to read the front page, the National section, the Metro section, and the front of the Business section of the Times every morning. I never read newspapers before I moved here, except for a while in Greensboro, when I had the coffee shop hold a Times for me – was it every day? It couldn’t have been – on Sundays.


• I make more money than I ever thought I would, and I am only barely above poverty level in the neighborhood where I live. I go out rarely, bring my lunch to work, never save any money and worry over bills every month.


• I love witnessing actual moments of human interaction between strangers. It can be scary, sad or heartening, sometimes all at once. Often, New York is all those things, all at once. I have grown to like that mix, strange seed of my present world.


• I am starting to…be interested in people. (I was going to say “like,” but that’s not right.) They are fascinating in their sheer ability to do disgusting shit in public. (Clipping toenails on the train; flossing teeth in plain view of others.) They are fascinating in the things they say out loud – to each other, to themselves, to me. (Group of young guys, walking down my tiny street this evening, on observing me and Doxy climbing the stairs to our apartment: “A lot of white people live here.”) And they are fascinating in their capacity for kindness. (Young punk in stovepipe pants, safety-pin-besotted t-shirt and eyeliner stops and helps mother carry baby carriage up subway steps.)


• I think of the rest of the country in a warped way: “I would never be able to find this job anywhere else…” or “What would I do there?” Living in New York really does make you think it is the best place in the world. It makes you wonder what in the world you would do if you didn’t live here, how you would actually live, or rather, how you could suffer any place but here.