Another great reason to love living in New York City: Free music in the parks during the lunch hour. Now, I'm sure they don't do it in all the parks, but they've got it here in Union Square, which is very cool.
There's a really interesting dynamic to this place... there are plenty of people just hanging around and enjoying the music. Regular people -- normal workaday folk -- and suddenly through the middle of it all will wander this tatooed-all-over shirtless skinny punk guy carrying all his possessions on his back. And off to the side are the crazy, weird and menacing VA hospital patients who've been allowed to roam the city for the day. I think I've noted this before.
The thing that I find most amazing is that these grizzled, inappropriately loud guys just wander the park, asking people for cigarettes or whatever, and the people -- rather than reacting in ways I suspect they would in any other place in America, with revulsion and horror -- simply tell them no and go on about their business of not acknowledging them. Every once in a while the group of them quiet down 'cuz one of them goes foraging for cigarettes.
I wonder if I'm starting to project a New Yorker attitude, 'cuz there seems to be this barrier around me that they just won't cross. A second of them has kind of approached me and hovered at the edge of my personal space, waiting for me to acknowledge that he's there.
So I just looked up at him with the classic New York "What?" look, and he wandered away without saying anything. I think I've turned into a native.
This place is a fiesta bonanza of cute men sunning themselves. I definitely need to get more sun over the next couple of weeks, 'cuz I suspect I'll be working hard in Philly, and not exactly falling over myself with sunning time. But I guess that's a bit of an excuse, isn't it? I imagine if I really wanted to, I would make the sunning time, wouldn't I? I mean, what am I doing right now, except sitting in the shade with my computer when I could be in a nice patch of sun, baking myself and setting myself up for some nice cancer later on?
So the battery was beginning to run low, and I decided to move indoors to the Starbucks on Union Square. This place is such a freaking madhouse. It's unbelievable. How anyone could possibly enjoy just having a little coffee and chat here is beyond me. The roar is deafening. And yet, here I lurk, waiting for a choice table to open up. One near an electrical outlet.
When I ordered my tea, there was a nice table available in the front of the store near the wall, but the stupid barista chick was such a slo-mo moron about making my tea that by the time I got it, the table was snatched up by some guy who doesn't even have anything to plug in. He's reading a book! The luddite.
I kid. A little.
Okay, not so much.
So I managed to score a spot on the "bar" (which I think of more as a "shelf") at the windows,and I'm watching the world go by. It's turned out to be a good choice, actually, since the world passing by is New York, and, on the whole, a lot more easy on the eyes than the world might be in another place. Once shouldn't speak in generalities of course, but some of what's passing in front of my window here frankly makes my mouth dry up and my eyeballs bug out.
It's another example of why New York can really be an intimidating city to live in, especially when you work in an industry that's mostly about how you look. There is, however, a small part of me that thinks it's almost always about how you look, no matter what industry you work in. I'm just saying that, over the years, I've observed that ugly people don't often end up with the premium jobs in any industry. Which is, of course, ridiculous, but indicative of our natural urge to wallow in the pit of evolution. Our tendancy is to advance those specimens that our unconscious tells us have the best chance of succeeding, and there are signs other than the diploma and past experience that we read without meaning to. We're animals after all. So take to equally qualified candidates of the same sex for a job, and I'm gonna guess that the "prettier" one will get it every time.
Again, a generalization, but what the heck. In for a penny, in for a pound.
No comments:
Post a Comment