I don’t
think it’s bragging to say I know my way around a Michael’s and though there are sections
of the store I rarely/never visit (framing/cake decorating), I am aware of
their existence, which is why while I’ve never explored the “floral”
area of my local Michael’s, I was fairly confident I’d be able to figure out
where they kept the dried herbs/flowers. Instead, I spent 45 minutes wandering
around in a Michael’s fugue state—at one point I had not one but two glue guns in
my arms, one low temperature and one high temperature, and if you’re wondering
what I needed two glue guns for, one high temperature and one low, I couldn’t
think of a reason either so eventually I put them back—and while there were
some 17 varieties of moss for sale, there was absolutely zero in terms of dried
herbs/flowers. I asked two different employees, neither of whom appeared to
have heard the word potpourri before, and forget about adding, “You
know, for a sachet?”
I got myself some consolation yarn and then stopped into the Harmon’s upstairs which is like a drugstore on steroids. I investigated every aisle (one employee tried to direct me to the poop smell cover-up section, which again, clearly potpourri is not a thing anymore) and while there were tons of odor-related products (candles, oils, sprays), when I finally found a rack of sachets hidden away in a dusty corner, they all smelled like garbage and even though the store had other products I actually needed I got really mad and left. Potpourri! Why is this so hard?!
***
The other day my Metro card wasn’t swiping—I kept getting the “swipe card again at this turnstile” message, which basically means “hahaha nope”—and when I tried it on the little swipey-tester thing instead of showing me the balance it just said “see agent.”
(During one of my fruitless attempts at swiping and reswiping, a woman exiting the turnstiles turned and waved me forward. “Go through,” she kept saying, and I was looking at her like she’s nuts because clearly my card wasn’t working and I couldn’t go through and then finally she managed to signal to me that she was going to use HER card to swipe ME through, which is a no-cost thing you can do when you have an unlimited card and was really very kind of her and while there was definitely a language barrier in play I still feel badly that she had to work so hard to be nice to me.)
I was early for an appointment at Grand Street so I went to the agent booth and slid my card through the little slidey spot and told the guy it wasn’t working. He did something and immediately slid the card back to me, saying, “There’s nothing wrong with it.” I knew empirically this wasn’t true so I just stared at him for a minute, probably with my mouth hanging open, and that gave him an opening for a lecture on how swiping works: not too slow, not too fast, am I sure I was doing it correctly? I didn’t get mad at the guy—what’s the point—instead I just swiped the card on the swipey tester thing on the front of his booth where we could both see the “see agent” message come up. I slid the card back to him, without speaking, and he said “I can give you a new card, but there’s nothing wrong with this one.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said again, then in the same breath, “Okay, how much did you have on here? About forty bucks? Here, but there was nothing wrong with the other one,” and then he slid me a new card with forty dollars on it.
I have no idea how much was on the old card since the swipey-tester wouldn’t read it because there was something wrong with it, but I guarantee you it wasn’t forty dollars exactly so I have no idea if this fellow skimmed some money off my card exchange but then again he spends all day locked in a bullet-proof cage underground so I decided to take my new (working) card and count that a win.
***
There are these LinkNYC kiosks all around the city, I think installed where pay phones used to be, and they offer free wifi in a little circle around them and if you have a cord you can plug it in and charge your device(s) (okay); you can also make calls from the kiosk which means you can stand on a corner and shout into a tall box instead of your own phone, and you used to be able to watch tv on the screens but I think they shut that down because people were setting up little living rooms around them, like with actual furniture, and that was turning into kind of a problem especially since somebody figured out how to access porn. The kiosks have tall display screens on the side where they show ads and then, weirdly, NYC-related quotations and fun facts, and since I love both of those things (quotations and fun facts) I enjoy these kiosks very much. I don’t know the source of it but my recent favorite is, “A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.”
It's absolutely true that the norms for social interactions and appropriate behavior here are not the same ones I would apply when outside of the city, though of course sometimes I do forget that and further the stereotype of New Yorkers as self-centered and rude. I remember once I was with my dad in Saratoga and he introduced me to a neighbor who asked where I was visiting from. “The city,” I replied, and while I am pretty sure we all knew what that meant my father made a joke about “The city, oh yes, Cohoes,” and for the record, DAD—oh, goddamnit, I just looked it up and apparently Cohoes is actually a city so…fine. I will clarify in the future. Another time I was with my mother in Florida and the people ahead of us in line at a coffee shop were developing a deep and meaningful relationship with the cashier, or at least that was my impression since they were having some kind of conversation that went beyond placing an order, paying, and moving on. I don’t think I said anything but the look on my face must have made my feelings clear; when I turned that face to my mother, the stricken look of horror she gave me in response shamed me terribly and I feel slightly bad to this day.
Living in midtown Manhattan brings me into very regular contact with people who do not live here and at some point after a few months of boiling with rage every time I had to get from the east side to the west side, which meant going through Rock Center, Times Square, and/or both, I realized I needed to own the fact that I chose to live in tourist central and decided to channel my seething, white-hot anger into some form of kindness. Honoring the spirit of the mitzvah tank, which annoyed the living shit out of me whenever there was one parked near my old office, I decided I could still be super annoyed but also perform a mitzvah every day I interacted with visitors from away.
Mostly these mitzvahs consist of offering to take the family photo so everyone can be in the shot; I give a fair amount of directions, but so do most of us; and once in a while I end up walking a person or group the three or five blocks to their destination if that just seems easier than trying to explain how to get from the B/D/E stop at 7th Ave to the N/R/W at 49th Street, especially since that stop has different uptown/downtown entrances and they’re not super intuitive.
My friend John lives near me and we go to the theater together a lot. He has embraced my mitzvah project whole-heartedly, which means we’ll see a show, have a couple of drinks, and then end up taking pictures for a dozen or so couples/families/groups on our way home. I think we must appear particularly non-threatening when we’re together (he has a very friendly face), as people regularly hand us their fancy cameras or their phones, which more often than not are in a wallet case which means we have not just their phones but also their credit cards, ID, and cash. Obviously we are not the kind of people who would ever do anything but take the pictures and return the phone/wallet, but yikes, tourists: maybe don’t be QUITE so trusting of strangers? Because it amuses us, John and I have also developed a whole aesthetic for these Times Square photos, and we do not hesitate to art-direct the shoot. One of us will take the pictures while the other positions the models: if it’s a couple, we always try to get them to pose in a kiss; if it’s a family, we have them gather around mom and then we shout, “Now kiss mom!” and try to capture the moment of surprise in the shot. We are very confident that we are making terrific memories, but then again we’re usually a couple of bourbons deep and so who knows how it all works out but we definitely find it entertaining.
(Once, an extended family was trying to organize themselves for a picture and as they were all digging out phones and cameras to give to us the father was on the verge of handing us a baby before some other relative swooped in to free up his hands and I do have the occasional nightmare that the Times Square cops will somehow decide we are a couple of professional conmen instead of just a couple of jaded New Yorkers trying to find a new way to see the sights as we make our way home.)
***
One of my other great tourist-related pleasures is overhearing them describe what this place looks like to them. The other day I was hovering impatiently behind a phalanx of people who happened to be blocking the entrance to my building and as I looked for a line to take through them without actually bumping into anyone, one of the kids, a girl maybe 13 or 14, looked in through the plate glass into the lobby and exclaimed, “Look, people actually LIVE here, and they have their own butlers and everything!”
I don’t know if the doormen in my building would be psyched to be mistaken for butlers, but what this kid did hit on, perhaps without realizing it, is that in a space this small, with this many people, where we all actually live, we do function a little bit like a big household, or a small village: we’re just a couple hundred thousand of those jammed in together and we walk through a couple hundred of those little villages every day. On my way to Michael’s I walked along 22nd Street, through part of the previously-unknown-to-me tile district, a block with storefront after storefront filled with tiles—Mosaic House, The Tile Store, Nasco Stone and Tile, Cancos Tile—and yet it didn’t occur to me until later—duh—that instead of scouring Michael’s or Harmon’s or any other general store for my potpourri, I should go to the freaking flower district, where I am certain all manner of dried flowers and herbs await.
This city (in this case not Cohoes, but New York), is forever reminding me that it is made up entirely of individuals, an enormous honeycomb of people, each carving out our own little nooks and crannies, so packed together that the walls between us are tissue-thin and yet the warrens we occupy with our butlers and our esoteric merchandise and the way we care for others are both everywhere and obvious and sometimes almost impossible to see. If the gift is truly in the giving, I owe this place more than I can ever repay, but I certainly enjoy trying.
Give her a kiss, we shout, no, a real one, and I press the shutter as quickly as I can to try to capture that perfect progression of emotion from confusion to surprise to shy delight, all held together by trust, by luck, by love.
I got myself some consolation yarn and then stopped into the Harmon’s upstairs which is like a drugstore on steroids. I investigated every aisle (one employee tried to direct me to the poop smell cover-up section, which again, clearly potpourri is not a thing anymore) and while there were tons of odor-related products (candles, oils, sprays), when I finally found a rack of sachets hidden away in a dusty corner, they all smelled like garbage and even though the store had other products I actually needed I got really mad and left. Potpourri! Why is this so hard?!
***
The other day my Metro card wasn’t swiping—I kept getting the “swipe card again at this turnstile” message, which basically means “hahaha nope”—and when I tried it on the little swipey-tester thing instead of showing me the balance it just said “see agent.”
(During one of my fruitless attempts at swiping and reswiping, a woman exiting the turnstiles turned and waved me forward. “Go through,” she kept saying, and I was looking at her like she’s nuts because clearly my card wasn’t working and I couldn’t go through and then finally she managed to signal to me that she was going to use HER card to swipe ME through, which is a no-cost thing you can do when you have an unlimited card and was really very kind of her and while there was definitely a language barrier in play I still feel badly that she had to work so hard to be nice to me.)
I was early for an appointment at Grand Street so I went to the agent booth and slid my card through the little slidey spot and told the guy it wasn’t working. He did something and immediately slid the card back to me, saying, “There’s nothing wrong with it.” I knew empirically this wasn’t true so I just stared at him for a minute, probably with my mouth hanging open, and that gave him an opening for a lecture on how swiping works: not too slow, not too fast, am I sure I was doing it correctly? I didn’t get mad at the guy—what’s the point—instead I just swiped the card on the swipey tester thing on the front of his booth where we could both see the “see agent” message come up. I slid the card back to him, without speaking, and he said “I can give you a new card, but there’s nothing wrong with this one.”
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said again, then in the same breath, “Okay, how much did you have on here? About forty bucks? Here, but there was nothing wrong with the other one,” and then he slid me a new card with forty dollars on it.
I have no idea how much was on the old card since the swipey-tester wouldn’t read it because there was something wrong with it, but I guarantee you it wasn’t forty dollars exactly so I have no idea if this fellow skimmed some money off my card exchange but then again he spends all day locked in a bullet-proof cage underground so I decided to take my new (working) card and count that a win.
***
There are these LinkNYC kiosks all around the city, I think installed where pay phones used to be, and they offer free wifi in a little circle around them and if you have a cord you can plug it in and charge your device(s) (okay); you can also make calls from the kiosk which means you can stand on a corner and shout into a tall box instead of your own phone, and you used to be able to watch tv on the screens but I think they shut that down because people were setting up little living rooms around them, like with actual furniture, and that was turning into kind of a problem especially since somebody figured out how to access porn. The kiosks have tall display screens on the side where they show ads and then, weirdly, NYC-related quotations and fun facts, and since I love both of those things (quotations and fun facts) I enjoy these kiosks very much. I don’t know the source of it but my recent favorite is, “A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.”
It's absolutely true that the norms for social interactions and appropriate behavior here are not the same ones I would apply when outside of the city, though of course sometimes I do forget that and further the stereotype of New Yorkers as self-centered and rude. I remember once I was with my dad in Saratoga and he introduced me to a neighbor who asked where I was visiting from. “The city,” I replied, and while I am pretty sure we all knew what that meant my father made a joke about “The city, oh yes, Cohoes,” and for the record, DAD—oh, goddamnit, I just looked it up and apparently Cohoes is actually a city so…fine. I will clarify in the future. Another time I was with my mother in Florida and the people ahead of us in line at a coffee shop were developing a deep and meaningful relationship with the cashier, or at least that was my impression since they were having some kind of conversation that went beyond placing an order, paying, and moving on. I don’t think I said anything but the look on my face must have made my feelings clear; when I turned that face to my mother, the stricken look of horror she gave me in response shamed me terribly and I feel slightly bad to this day.
Living in midtown Manhattan brings me into very regular contact with people who do not live here and at some point after a few months of boiling with rage every time I had to get from the east side to the west side, which meant going through Rock Center, Times Square, and/or both, I realized I needed to own the fact that I chose to live in tourist central and decided to channel my seething, white-hot anger into some form of kindness. Honoring the spirit of the mitzvah tank, which annoyed the living shit out of me whenever there was one parked near my old office, I decided I could still be super annoyed but also perform a mitzvah every day I interacted with visitors from away.
Mostly these mitzvahs consist of offering to take the family photo so everyone can be in the shot; I give a fair amount of directions, but so do most of us; and once in a while I end up walking a person or group the three or five blocks to their destination if that just seems easier than trying to explain how to get from the B/D/E stop at 7th Ave to the N/R/W at 49th Street, especially since that stop has different uptown/downtown entrances and they’re not super intuitive.
My friend John lives near me and we go to the theater together a lot. He has embraced my mitzvah project whole-heartedly, which means we’ll see a show, have a couple of drinks, and then end up taking pictures for a dozen or so couples/families/groups on our way home. I think we must appear particularly non-threatening when we’re together (he has a very friendly face), as people regularly hand us their fancy cameras or their phones, which more often than not are in a wallet case which means we have not just their phones but also their credit cards, ID, and cash. Obviously we are not the kind of people who would ever do anything but take the pictures and return the phone/wallet, but yikes, tourists: maybe don’t be QUITE so trusting of strangers? Because it amuses us, John and I have also developed a whole aesthetic for these Times Square photos, and we do not hesitate to art-direct the shoot. One of us will take the pictures while the other positions the models: if it’s a couple, we always try to get them to pose in a kiss; if it’s a family, we have them gather around mom and then we shout, “Now kiss mom!” and try to capture the moment of surprise in the shot. We are very confident that we are making terrific memories, but then again we’re usually a couple of bourbons deep and so who knows how it all works out but we definitely find it entertaining.
(Once, an extended family was trying to organize themselves for a picture and as they were all digging out phones and cameras to give to us the father was on the verge of handing us a baby before some other relative swooped in to free up his hands and I do have the occasional nightmare that the Times Square cops will somehow decide we are a couple of professional conmen instead of just a couple of jaded New Yorkers trying to find a new way to see the sights as we make our way home.)
***
One of my other great tourist-related pleasures is overhearing them describe what this place looks like to them. The other day I was hovering impatiently behind a phalanx of people who happened to be blocking the entrance to my building and as I looked for a line to take through them without actually bumping into anyone, one of the kids, a girl maybe 13 or 14, looked in through the plate glass into the lobby and exclaimed, “Look, people actually LIVE here, and they have their own butlers and everything!”
I don’t know if the doormen in my building would be psyched to be mistaken for butlers, but what this kid did hit on, perhaps without realizing it, is that in a space this small, with this many people, where we all actually live, we do function a little bit like a big household, or a small village: we’re just a couple hundred thousand of those jammed in together and we walk through a couple hundred of those little villages every day. On my way to Michael’s I walked along 22nd Street, through part of the previously-unknown-to-me tile district, a block with storefront after storefront filled with tiles—Mosaic House, The Tile Store, Nasco Stone and Tile, Cancos Tile—and yet it didn’t occur to me until later—duh—that instead of scouring Michael’s or Harmon’s or any other general store for my potpourri, I should go to the freaking flower district, where I am certain all manner of dried flowers and herbs await.
This city (in this case not Cohoes, but New York), is forever reminding me that it is made up entirely of individuals, an enormous honeycomb of people, each carving out our own little nooks and crannies, so packed together that the walls between us are tissue-thin and yet the warrens we occupy with our butlers and our esoteric merchandise and the way we care for others are both everywhere and obvious and sometimes almost impossible to see. If the gift is truly in the giving, I owe this place more than I can ever repay, but I certainly enjoy trying.
Give her a kiss, we shout, no, a real one, and I press the shutter as quickly as I can to try to capture that perfect progression of emotion from confusion to surprise to shy delight, all held together by trust, by luck, by love.
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