Nothing to Lose / The Big Apple
About a month ago, I was preparing for a conference in NYC. I decided to add a few days to my trip so I could check out the town. Needing a place to stay, and not wanting to shell out big bucks for a hotel, and wanting to meet someone new, and knowing that there was no way to see the entire city in a couple of extra days, I decided to stretch myself a bit. So I posted a request on Craigslist. Here's the bulk of the posting I submitted in late Feb:
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Here's the story. I'm headed to nyc in late March for a conference. I'm extending my stay for a few days and hope to find somebody who loves the city and wants to share her favorite parts of it. I figure, there's no way I can see the town in 2 days, so I'd rather make up in quality what I'll lose in quantity.
Me: 6'3, grad degree. smart, witty, thoughtful. not cool or cultured in the elitist sense. i eat meat. i don't have good fashion sense. i like classic rock (which i define right now as 'jack and diane' and 'the river' and 'night moves'). i don't like mushrooms too much, but i do like cynicism and sarcasm. i'm from wyoming. public transportation is a mystery to me. so is national politics. i'm happily average.
Oh yeah, the crazy part: I wanna stay at your place. Not because I can't afford a hotel, and not because I'm a psycho killer. Because I want to believe in hospitality--that people are still willing to trust and share with someone who comes from a different place. I want to see what you live like. So, tell me about yourself. Tell me what you'd want me to see in the 48 hours I've got to check it out. Tell me what book you're reading now.
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It took a long time to craft the posting; I could say a lot about my rhetorical choices. Aiming for an audience of 8 million or so people, I felt confident that my brilliant tone and selection of detail would elicit plenty of options. Here's the first response I got back:
"At first I was all about that shit. The city from a locals point is far more interesting then what you see as a tourist. There is so much culture, so many bizarre places, history, free wierdo shit to do that only new york could ever offer. It's the moments where you're sitting in carnagie hall one minute, and watching a guy take a shit next to you on the train the next. It's the owner of the local bodega who knows you by name. It's 99cent soup at the grossest restaurant in the country, it's bars with drag kareoke, onion and mustard appitizers... You'll have a good time, but no one is going to let you stay in their apartment. Most people don't even have room for a toaster."
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Unphased, I optimistically waited for my inbox to fill with replies. I got one more response. From a girl with an apartment on Broadway, a world-traveled Indian working for an NPO and going to school full time who, it turns out, was sorting through the frustration and complexity of having ended a relationship with her girlfriend. Someone who was, she wrote, "not looking for anything but simplicity... an honest laugh a pay-it-forward moment to share my city."
It sounded good. Then, a bunch of no-luck attempts to get in contact with one another. I was starting to wonder if Sasha was just stringing me along. One time we got cut off as we were trying to make plans; when I finally got back in touch with her she claimed she'd dropped her phone in a puddle and lost her contact info. Whatever: it was looking less and less auspicious. I bought a guide book and marked some hotels I could call if the address she gave me turned out to be non-existent. Or a crack house.
Feeling somewhat less positive about my brilliant plan to experience the city with a native, I headed off to catch my plane, present at the conference, and, hopefully, catch up with Sasha on Saturday afternoon before heading out to see the sights.
Now that I've returned from the trip, people ask me how I liked New York. I've been back for half a week, and the honest answer is still, I don't know. Usually I don't have any trouble forming an opinion about things like this. If anything, I'm too good at reaching strong conclusions based on insufficient evidence. But this time, after four days in NYC, I still didn't know what I felt about it.
An undergrad who works at the Writing Center says that NYC is dirtier than other cities she's visited. I disagree; but it is more grey than other cities. I have a memory of DC being much more colorful and of lighter hue than Manhattan. Of course the weather was grey during this trip, but it was more than that.
Yana--one of Sasha's friends and a really clever girl who's from Bulgaria--likes NYC because it reminds her of home. She likes it even though, or exactly because, the people aren't as friendly as they are in other cities she's lived in, and because I think she senses a pervasive pessimism (or maybe just realism) in the people she's gotten to know there. I think I might understand what she means. Other people I talked to say that NYC is a city where the people love to hate other people. Not overtly, I think—no one was overtly hostile to me. But I wonder if the people who live there aren’t both addicted to the throng of humanity there and repulsed by the weight of the social world around them.
I've never been in a place which is so completely constructed. Layers of humanity, layers of representation, layers of complexity and variety and possibility. And I wonder how it affects people, to be so far from the dirt, to be so far from the natural resources which form the substance of the individuals which they have become. I realize how strongly my own conception of right and wrong is tied to a sense of the natural world around me. The irony of a term like ‘natural world’ is not lost on me.
In a relatively unpopulated space, it seems natural to seek out others for conversation and for company. In a relatively populated space, it seems natural to ignore others on the subway sitting next to you; they are, after all, just another set of faces in a city where the number of faces, of bodies, of individuals, becomes uncountable and even overwhelming. I usually feel that I’ve failed when I don’t attempt a dialogue with the woman who sits next to me on the airplane, the man who stands next to me on the subway, the children who stare at me over the tops of the seats on a bus.
Sasha, when I’m talking to her on Monday before I leave to catch my flight, says that uncertainty about events in life—about jobs, apartments, relationships—doesn’t make her feel unstable about her inner world. She says that having too much of a plan makes her feel out of control—because then the plan controls her actions, and she feels less able to respond to new needs and desires that arise. She makes perfect sense. I don’t understand her at all.
Sunday morning I slip out of her apartment while she and Yana are still sleeping. On my way to the Met I call my friend Dave’s sister, who also lives in the big town. She thinks that it sounds like fun to meet me in Times Square and stand in line for Broadway show tickets. By the time we get to the front of the line, it’s too late to make the matinees. We get tickets for the night show of Beauty and the Beast. In the few hours we have to kill, we eat ramen at a Japanese restaurant, go shopping at H&M, and ride the elevator in the Marriot Hotel.
No matter how sophisticated I become, riding the elevator still sounds like fun. The Marriot elevator is a glass one, looking out over the interior courtyard of the hotel. We ride to the 24th floor; on the way back down our ears pop and the ants below us turn back into people.
During dinner Meredith says that, after a few days of visiting her parents in the West Virginia countryside, she starts to feel isolated; returning to the city makes her feel like part of the social world again. Somewhere over Kansas, looking out over miles and miles of crop circles and unending county roads and not a single house, I begin to feel human again. The city makes me insignificant and almost invisible, even to myself.
It’s hard to know how I feel about NYC because I don’t know what I expected to see. What does it mean to “see” the city? I didn’t visit the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t ride the Staten Island Ferry. I didn’t walk across the Brooklyn Bridge or check out the view from the Empire State Building. I didn’t eat dim sun in Chinatown or drink coffee in the Village. But I did meet Sasha and Yana and Will and Alexis and Robbie Powers and Ally and I ate Mexican at the Rocking Horse Café and drank a Guinness at South St. Sea Port and listened to Sasha and Yana decide whether it was worth the trip to Long Island to pick up Ally. I discovered what rent and car insurance and groceries cost and how much a month pass for the subway costs. I learned that bread lightly fried in a pan tastes better than bread toasted in the toaster. I realized that I could adjust to the constant humming of the city but probably would have a harder time adjusting to the hurry-up-and-wait, always-another-line, stop-and-go way of life in the city. People are the same everywhere. And so different, too.
-----
Here's the story. I'm headed to nyc in late March for a conference. I'm extending my stay for a few days and hope to find somebody who loves the city and wants to share her favorite parts of it. I figure, there's no way I can see the town in 2 days, so I'd rather make up in quality what I'll lose in quantity.
Me: 6'3, grad degree. smart, witty, thoughtful. not cool or cultured in the elitist sense. i eat meat. i don't have good fashion sense. i like classic rock (which i define right now as 'jack and diane' and 'the river' and 'night moves'). i don't like mushrooms too much, but i do like cynicism and sarcasm. i'm from wyoming. public transportation is a mystery to me. so is national politics. i'm happily average.
Oh yeah, the crazy part: I wanna stay at your place. Not because I can't afford a hotel, and not because I'm a psycho killer. Because I want to believe in hospitality--that people are still willing to trust and share with someone who comes from a different place. I want to see what you live like. So, tell me about yourself. Tell me what you'd want me to see in the 48 hours I've got to check it out. Tell me what book you're reading now.
-----
It took a long time to craft the posting; I could say a lot about my rhetorical choices. Aiming for an audience of 8 million or so people, I felt confident that my brilliant tone and selection of detail would elicit plenty of options. Here's the first response I got back:
"At first I was all about that shit. The city from a locals point is far more interesting then what you see as a tourist. There is so much culture, so many bizarre places, history, free wierdo shit to do that only new york could ever offer. It's the moments where you're sitting in carnagie hall one minute, and watching a guy take a shit next to you on the train the next. It's the owner of the local bodega who knows you by name. It's 99cent soup at the grossest restaurant in the country, it's bars with drag kareoke, onion and mustard appitizers... You'll have a good time, but no one is going to let you stay in their apartment. Most people don't even have room for a toaster."
-------
Unphased, I optimistically waited for my inbox to fill with replies. I got one more response. From a girl with an apartment on Broadway, a world-traveled Indian working for an NPO and going to school full time who, it turns out, was sorting through the frustration and complexity of having ended a relationship with her girlfriend. Someone who was, she wrote, "not looking for anything but simplicity... an honest laugh a pay-it-forward moment to share my city."
It sounded good. Then, a bunch of no-luck attempts to get in contact with one another. I was starting to wonder if Sasha was just stringing me along. One time we got cut off as we were trying to make plans; when I finally got back in touch with her she claimed she'd dropped her phone in a puddle and lost her contact info. Whatever: it was looking less and less auspicious. I bought a guide book and marked some hotels I could call if the address she gave me turned out to be non-existent. Or a crack house.
Feeling somewhat less positive about my brilliant plan to experience the city with a native, I headed off to catch my plane, present at the conference, and, hopefully, catch up with Sasha on Saturday afternoon before heading out to see the sights.
Now that I've returned from the trip, people ask me how I liked New York. I've been back for half a week, and the honest answer is still, I don't know. Usually I don't have any trouble forming an opinion about things like this. If anything, I'm too good at reaching strong conclusions based on insufficient evidence. But this time, after four days in NYC, I still didn't know what I felt about it.
An undergrad who works at the Writing Center says that NYC is dirtier than other cities she's visited. I disagree; but it is more grey than other cities. I have a memory of DC being much more colorful and of lighter hue than Manhattan. Of course the weather was grey during this trip, but it was more than that.
Yana--one of Sasha's friends and a really clever girl who's from Bulgaria--likes NYC because it reminds her of home. She likes it even though, or exactly because, the people aren't as friendly as they are in other cities she's lived in, and because I think she senses a pervasive pessimism (or maybe just realism) in the people she's gotten to know there. I think I might understand what she means. Other people I talked to say that NYC is a city where the people love to hate other people. Not overtly, I think—no one was overtly hostile to me. But I wonder if the people who live there aren’t both addicted to the throng of humanity there and repulsed by the weight of the social world around them.
I've never been in a place which is so completely constructed. Layers of humanity, layers of representation, layers of complexity and variety and possibility. And I wonder how it affects people, to be so far from the dirt, to be so far from the natural resources which form the substance of the individuals which they have become. I realize how strongly my own conception of right and wrong is tied to a sense of the natural world around me. The irony of a term like ‘natural world’ is not lost on me.
In a relatively unpopulated space, it seems natural to seek out others for conversation and for company. In a relatively populated space, it seems natural to ignore others on the subway sitting next to you; they are, after all, just another set of faces in a city where the number of faces, of bodies, of individuals, becomes uncountable and even overwhelming. I usually feel that I’ve failed when I don’t attempt a dialogue with the woman who sits next to me on the airplane, the man who stands next to me on the subway, the children who stare at me over the tops of the seats on a bus.
Sasha, when I’m talking to her on Monday before I leave to catch my flight, says that uncertainty about events in life—about jobs, apartments, relationships—doesn’t make her feel unstable about her inner world. She says that having too much of a plan makes her feel out of control—because then the plan controls her actions, and she feels less able to respond to new needs and desires that arise. She makes perfect sense. I don’t understand her at all.
Sunday morning I slip out of her apartment while she and Yana are still sleeping. On my way to the Met I call my friend Dave’s sister, who also lives in the big town. She thinks that it sounds like fun to meet me in Times Square and stand in line for Broadway show tickets. By the time we get to the front of the line, it’s too late to make the matinees. We get tickets for the night show of Beauty and the Beast. In the few hours we have to kill, we eat ramen at a Japanese restaurant, go shopping at H&M, and ride the elevator in the Marriot Hotel.
No matter how sophisticated I become, riding the elevator still sounds like fun. The Marriot elevator is a glass one, looking out over the interior courtyard of the hotel. We ride to the 24th floor; on the way back down our ears pop and the ants below us turn back into people.
During dinner Meredith says that, after a few days of visiting her parents in the West Virginia countryside, she starts to feel isolated; returning to the city makes her feel like part of the social world again. Somewhere over Kansas, looking out over miles and miles of crop circles and unending county roads and not a single house, I begin to feel human again. The city makes me insignificant and almost invisible, even to myself.
It’s hard to know how I feel about NYC because I don’t know what I expected to see. What does it mean to “see” the city? I didn’t visit the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t ride the Staten Island Ferry. I didn’t walk across the Brooklyn Bridge or check out the view from the Empire State Building. I didn’t eat dim sun in Chinatown or drink coffee in the Village. But I did meet Sasha and Yana and Will and Alexis and Robbie Powers and Ally and I ate Mexican at the Rocking Horse Café and drank a Guinness at South St. Sea Port and listened to Sasha and Yana decide whether it was worth the trip to Long Island to pick up Ally. I discovered what rent and car insurance and groceries cost and how much a month pass for the subway costs. I learned that bread lightly fried in a pan tastes better than bread toasted in the toaster. I realized that I could adjust to the constant humming of the city but probably would have a harder time adjusting to the hurry-up-and-wait, always-another-line, stop-and-go way of life in the city. People are the same everywhere. And so different, too.
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