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New York is a sexy city. I’ve always thought it has big pros and big cons, like a zoo that lets you enter all the cages. On the one hand, that zoo would be the best zoo ever because you could pet a real lion, but on the other hand, it would be the worst zoo ever because the lion might eat you, just like New York ate up George Castanza when he pretended to be a Little Rock tourist.
I spent a couple days in New York this week, dangerously mixing business and pleasure, even though I don’t actually believe it’s dangerous to mix business and pleasure. If you think of business as beer and pleasure as tequila, it does sound like a bad idea to integrate the two until you realize that Tequiza is an underrated beverage.
Here’s what I (heart) about NY:
It’s a hotbed of creative energy. If cities were college students, Boston would be a science major, Los Angeles would write the fashion column in the Friday paper, Denver would be a pothead, and New York would be an econ major who makes nice paintings in his free time and whom everyone likes because he’s also the funniest dude in school. If you don’t know anyone from college who fits that description, that’s okay because neither do I, and that’s what makes New York so special. They don’t call it “Unique New York” for nothing.
You can’t go a block in New York without bumping into somebody famous or important. On Wednesday night we were eating late night pork buns in a restaurant in the East Village and the executive producer of The Daily Show walked in and sat with us because he knew a member of our party. This could have been a good opportunity to exchange ideas with someone whose work I really respect, but instead I argued with him about why they should invite Britney Spears as a guest on the show. I was a little drunk.
When you’re in New York, the creative spirit captures you. I was only there for two days, but Heiny and I ended up inventing a new acronym that will probably sweep the nation. It’s RAIP, and it stands for Right After I Poop. You can use it anytime you want to buy time. Like if your mom or wife wants you to take out the trash, you just say, “RAIP!” and you won’t have to do it for at least ten minutes.
I don’t think people are really going to take to that acronym.
Why?
Well, first of all, most people don’t want to draw attention to the fact that they have to poop.
Yeah, right.
And second of all, “rape” is already a word, and it has very negative connotations.
True. But “sick,” “ill,” and “nasty” are also words with previously negative connotations. I think it’s always a good idea to take a bad word and flip it into a good word. From now on, when someone calls you a RAIPist, you can say, “Yes, I do have a tendency to procrastinate, but at least I don’t force people to have sex with me.”
I also like that New York has so many esoteric local hangouts. I had lunch with my friend Lynda on Thursday and she was explaining that everyone around her workplace knew which vendor sold the best street meat, which vendor sold the best rice and beans, and which vendors to avoid at all costs. But we weren’t going to get lunch from a street vendor – we were going to a “hole in the wall.”
I said, “I kind of see New York as a series of holes in a big wall,” which I thought was clever.
But then we went to the lunch spot and it was (literally) a hole in the wall. Probably five feet deep by three feet wide. Two guys worked there – the sandwich artist, and Johnny, the toothless cashier. You can only find a lunch spot like that in New York, probably because New York doesn’t have a Board of Health.
But it does have diversity. You don’t see many authentic punks in Boston, but they’re as ubiquitous in New York as bicyclists in Shanghai. I sat across the subway aisle from a couple that had green hair (his) and purple hair (hers). The guy’s hair only covered half his head because the other side was freshly buzzed and revealed some kind of winged argyle tattoo. At one point, the girl pulled out a compact mirror and began applying dark violet lip-gloss. I thought this was a very mainstream, Cosmo-girl thing to do, but then I realized that it must be extra hard to apply gloss when you have multiple lip rings.
Being on the same train as the punks made me feel like I was in that zoo that lets you get in the cage with the lions. It was cool to see real punks up close, to examine their tattoos, but I also knew that they could attack me at any second.
This is why you have to be careful that New York doesn’t eat you alive.
And the first thing it will eat is your wallet. If my apartment were in Manhattan, I would have to pay 4 billion dollars a month for it. That’s why so many people live in Brooklyn, even though it takes an hour to commute to the city from there. And I got a parking ticket for 115 dollars on Thursday. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Hey Bloomberg, I’ll pay it RAIP.
Manhattan is also packed too tightly. I’m impressed when a bodega can fit the contents of an entire Wal-Mart on its shelves, but I like a little more room to roam. Everything is so vertical in New York that you can forget that you’re on an island surrounded by river. When I’m there I feel like I’m on an endless plain of concrete, and I miss nature, which is how Keanu Reeves must have felt when he woke up in The Matrix and realized that he was naked and that robots were tapping him for sustenance.
I’ve also noticed that there are a lot of crazy people in New York. I can deal with crazy people – there are plenty of them around my apartment in South Boston, but their insanity is more introspective. The lunatics of New York seem to be in a competition to out-crazy each other. They have to find new ways to be insane. Lynda and I saw one woman who was walking backwards across a park, very deliberately. Lynda thought she was maybe doing it for physical therapy purposes, but then the woman took several steps forward, picked up a pebble, inspected it, cast it aside, and continued walking backwards. She was definitely crazy. And then Heiny and I saw a woman who was dumping salad on a sidewalk and angrily kicking it at people. When your crazy people are competitive extroverts, it makes for a dangerous environment.
Many of my friends point to New York’s abundance of attractive women as a big pro, but I think it might actually be a big con. A lot of these women wear those big sunglasses that are specifically designed to repel guys like me. That’s what their trendy haircuts and jeans-tucked-into-boots are for, too. I have the same feeling walking in New York as I do when the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition arrives – intrigued, but slightly frustrated because it’s not like I’m actually going to make out with a supermodel in Tahiti who has a Packers jersey painted on to her breasts, so why bother getting excited?
A city’s women say a lot about the city itself, and I don’t think I’ll ever live with a New York woman, or in a New York apartment, but I’ll always enjoy looking and visiting.
So yeah, New York’s sexy. But for me, a little too sexy.
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