Do you remember that song called “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)?” The guy dispenses unsolicited advice urging America’s youth to seize the day. He says, “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.” It seems to me that if people actually heeded his advice, Manhattan would be a desolate ghost town, and tumbleweed would blow across Madison Avenue.
Last year, I interned for a major magazine. I was ready to take a bite out of the Big Apple, yet little did I know it was going to take a bite out of me. Leaving from a town of about 75,000 inhabitants to one with 8 million can frankly be traumatizing. I hadn’t prepared myself for the cultural experience in which I was about to partake, and living in New York City was just plain AWKWARD at times. But I loved every minute of it.
So, I decided to scribble down some reasons why living in NYC is incredibly awkward yet we continue to love it anyway.
1. People will spend $500 [or more] on a pair of designer shoes to wear in the streets of Manhattan, yet somehow forget what exactly is on a New York City street. Subway grates, chewed gum, motor oil, drug paraphernalia and cigarette butts all make their home on NYC streets. Why would anyone want to walk around filthy streets in brand new Jimmy Choos? I guess for those that don’t know, because it makes us feel like Carrie Bradshaw for a moment.
2. The subway: the entire concept of it. What isn’t awkward about it? Armpits in your face during rush hour, pick pockets, stupid tourists who refer to trains by color, homeless bums with green foot infections who beg for money to get “treatment” for it. It’s just gross, but it’s a cultural experience in and of itself.
3. Everywhere else in America you get a whole pizza, but in New York, it’s purchased by the slice. I love the single slice pizza concept, as I am single. But, try explaining this to someone not from the area; they’ll never understand. If it’s not a Sbarro chain in the local mall food court, the pure fact that someone would open up a restaurant where pizza is sold by the slice is unfathomable where I’m from.
4. Random celebrity sightings are known to happen: it’s just most New Yorkers are too damn busy with their own lives to even notice. A mob of photographers? Screaming fans? It’s just another day in New York. In any other city in America, people would stop and ask for pictures and autographs. In New York, locals flip the paparazzi off and spat out a few profanities about people blocking the sidewalk.
5. City dwellers will somehow manage to get six people to live in a one-bedroom apartment. With New York’s cutthroat real estate market, it can make it extremely difficult to find an “affordable” place to live somewhere in the five boroughs. Squeezing six people into a one-bedroom apartment somehow manages to work here, but if you were to try that in some other city, it’d never work. Don’t even try.
6. It’s impossible to get lost in New York. The entire city is mapped out like a grid, but once you get to the West Village kids, you’re on your own! Bleecker Street, Perry Street, that other street! Where do these ye olde brick roads take you? Most likely, to some new, trendy designer boutique or exorbitantly priced restaurant. If you run into the “Sex and the City” tour bus in the West Village, most likely you are near Magnolia Bakery or Carrie’s apartment stoop. Don’t worry, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
~Sara B. McKinniss
Columbus, Ohio
s09.smckinniss@wittenberg.edu
