Surviving New York

It’s taken me awhile to adjust to New York.  But I can finally commute to work without fearing for my life.  I found that the secret to staying calm and composed in this rat race is to look for reactions from the long time New Yorkers and follow their lead.  They aren’t hard to spot.  They’re a conundrum of callus and culture.

When one man pulled a knife on another in the Subway, I followed their lead and quietly walked to the other side of the car without making eye-contact.  I also followed their lead when a crazed man came on our car and starting yelling about committing mass suicide.  I thought he was going to kill us all, but I looked around and saw that the New Yorkers weren’t even phased.  They just turned up the volume on their iPods and drowned out the apocalyptic soliloquy .

But the other day, a man came onto the train.  He looked scary, but far less scary than the guy with the knife.  He was wearing pink parachute pants, and a matching pink fishing cap.  It look liked the worst thing he could do was wash my whites.  I checked my litmus New Yorkers, and saw that an extra-grizzled man was making the sign of the cross and saying a few “Hail Marys.”  If this guy needed to pray, I needed to be shitting my pants.  But no one has killed me yet.

Dick Density in New York

Ok so that title might be misleading, but I have a hypothesis about the anger of New Yorkers. New Yorkers are not assholes in general, there are just more assholes in New York. Last night I was walking through Manhattan and saw a very hideous gentlemen nearing a cross-walk and a car pulled off of the curb into traffic, his window was down and his lights were off. The hideous kid screamed at the car, “Turn your fucking lights on you dick!” The driver forgot to turn his lights on, and I think a “turn your lights on,” would have sufficed. But this gross kid had to throw a few expletives in there to make his point. I broke him down psychologically and determined that he was pissed at the world because he was such a frumpy fuck. The usual excuse for most assholes. And even though this incident wasn’t the most assholey thing I’ve seen here-not close-I think it illustrates my point.

Because of the extremely dense population of the city an average person like myself is more likely to come across assholes like this ugly guy. In Oregon I wouldn’t come across as many people per day, so therefore I did not see as many assholes per day. However in New York, the assholes are ever present because people are ever present. And assholes are unfortunately the thing that you tend to remember from the days activities, or maybe it’s really ugly people that you remember, and that’s why I used this guy for my example.

Look for future posts about my time in New York, as tomorrow I finally move out of my roommates room and into my own cell.