Today's thoughts

I've been here only a few days and already I think I can tell it's the not the kind of place I'd want to live for very long. People here strike me as missing some vital part of their humanity, like they're just overlooking something obvious, or not quite "with it." Then again, yesterday I was imagining that everyone here was in on some big secret I just didn't get because I'm an outsider. Not so much the suited stockbroker types; more the Black women in plantation-era headscarves who seem connected to some wider sense of history that no one else can perceive. But maybe that's just a superficial observation.

My interview today proceeded strangely. I ended up feeling as though it wasn't really an interview at all, more just a 10-minute chit-chat that didn't give me any sort of opportunity to tell the company why I want to work for them and what I'm good at. I felt like I made a big mistake when I told them my goal is to be a writer or editor for a major publication, preferably in arts/culture/music. They immediately launched into an explanation of how the job I'm applying for isn't "tracked" to become a writing or editing position, which I already knew and said so. But what was I supposed to do, say I want to become the best damn photocopier in the world? They're the ones who asked.

I thought a couple days ago that people here were generally very friendly. Well, I haven't experienced any direct unfriendliness myself, but I want to amend that earlier comment: people here can be real assholes to each other. I've witnessed lots of phone conversations on the street that involve one person screaming and cursing at another. When Christina and I were getting my new cell phone at Verizon, one of the employees took a call from her mother and got into a loud and very public argument about how her mother's demanding too much from her and she can't expect to see her daughter all the time. I guess people are used to living some parts of their lives very much in the open here, and figure no one else notices or cares.

I keep thinking I'm going to run into people I know, or even more strangely, people I've seen just the other day. I forget that this city is HUGE and that the likelihood of seeing the same person twice, especially within a couple days, is almost nil...it's sort of "magical thinking," in Joan Didion's words, whose book on the matter I have not read. But then again, I think I did see the same woman pushing a baby stroller twice in a couple days. And I saw Hank Azaria running in Central Park yesterday evening, which doesn't really have anything to do with this train of thought, but is interesting.