One of the nicest things about living in New York City is having the chance to look at it with fresh eyes after a trip away.
It could be the exhaust fumes, but for me there’s really nothing like the few minutes after you emerge from the Lincoln tunnel, dead-tired from a day of travel and a couple hours’ sleep and what Jack Kerouac describes in On the Road as the “gray cloud” of the city washes over you. There’s usually nothing pretty about this moment: honking taxis, gunky cement, some unfinished glass-box condos that never seem to get any higher. Today, there was pouring rain after a week of sunny Hawaiian beaches.
But, dammit, it’s a great feeling. There’s a kind of intense honesty about New York City streets. Forget poise. People walk fast because they’re busy. Advertisements cling to just about every exposed surface and yell at you to buy something because, well, that’s what they’re for. Taxis jostle for position and gun for yellow lights because they can squeeze out a few extra bucks from another fare. It that wonderful, fluid, and uniquely New York=flavored chaos channeled into the city grid around the clock. And all this wonderful mess went on as usual, in fifth gear, without you. You’re home, and nobody notices but you.
Beautiful.
I lifted this sprawling sentence from an article on Robert Rubin, Citigroup’s long-time advisor with a mythological reputaion, in today’s Sunday Business section:
At the Treasury Department, Mr. Rubin threaded a moderate stance on the always-controversial issue of market regulation, navigating between conservative free marketeers like Mr. Greenspan who wanted to streamline regulation and more liberal advocates demanding tighter monitoring of the securities industry.
Would that happen to be the same kind of “streamlined regulation” that got us into this colossal credit crunch? And why do liberal advocates ‘demand’ tighter monitoring while Greenspan gets off by merely ‘wanting’ ’streamlining’?
Read carefully enough and you’ll find that any stereotype is untrue.
It’s odd how your perception of the age difference to younger or older friends seems to shrink dramatically when you reach adulthood. A good friend of mine who always seemed incredibly immature when I was in high school was just two grades behind me. Now I see little difference between us. Likewise, a babysitter seven years my senior always seemed impossibly older and full of authority. I treat her as a peer now.
From a police officer off the Bedford L stop, talking into his cell phone:
“Let me ask you a question, Mom. Do you love me?”
In an effort to shore up my somewhat lacking vocabulary skills for the GRE, I’ve been compiling a list of all the new and unfamiliar words that I come across when reading. Here’s what I have so far:
Querulous
Imprimateur
Bemused
Chattel
Tendentious
Natty
Inveigh
Punctilious
Yeoman
Zaftig
Oenophile
Semaphore
Rebarbiter
Termagant
Vainglorious
Fillip
Raffish
Aplomb
Piquant
Cadging
Astringent
Deplored
Sempiternal
Penury
Tenuous
Impertinance
Teutonic
Churlish
Recusal
Coterie
Asperity
Strident
Phlegmatic
Rigmarole
Florid
Potentate
Puissant
From a girl in a coffee shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn:
“I’m so glad I’m back in New York. I can’t stand anywhere else in America.”
The software you buy advertises free will-creating add-ons.
A friend and I were sitting on the G train and waiting for it to wind its usual slow way through the seedy underbelly of Brooklyn when I noticed a copy of the New York Times magazine lying on the seat beside me. There not being a conversation to distract my attention, I started flipping through it quietly. One of the first pages that caught my attention had an ad for a condo development with a floor plan that looked something like this:
(Click the photo for access to the listing.)
Just in case you’re curious, the price of admission to the above apartment is $6,650,000. When I first moved to New York a year ago, I was both overwhelmed and seduced by the density of wealth here. If I had seen this ad at the time, I imagine my mouth would have watered and I would have spent a good five minutes imagining what sorts of awesome things I would do if I could afford such a sum.
Let’s see. I might spin around until I got dizzy in my massive living room. Then I’d run around the apartment just for the sheer kinetic enjoyment of so much space on such a small, crowded island. I would do this to remind me of how successful I was. Then I’d probably sit down, panting, at my computer, and go read my favorite blogs, then play with some programming projects I had going at the time, and maybe pick up a book and go read.
This is where my fantasy ends, but it’s not the end of the blog post. The point I’d like to make is that the above situation could never happen, seeing as a) I did not and am not going to inherit (and not have to work for) large sums of money, and b) I’m not willing to devote very much time and energy to making buckets of money.
Let me talk about b), since I think a) is fairly self explanatory. Yes, if I worked hard for many years, I might be able to afford a $6,650,000 apartment. I could stay up late pouring through the WSJ, Harvard Business Review, Conde Nast Portfolio, and watching CNBC. I could agonize over ups and downs, discuss and argue with close friends about which stocks I thought were undervalued, and use terms like liquidity and market cap when talking about my securities, ETFs, and CDs. But this isn’t what I want. I’d be miserable. I find pleasure only in **spending** money, not in earning money for its own sake. So it’s not for me.
To be rich, to build wealth, and to afford the kinds of apartments that push people like me out to Bed-Stuy, you have to love earning money, rather than the things you can obtain with it. So it’s very much a catch-22. If you WANT the apartment for its own sake, you probably won’t be able to afford it (unless, again, you were born into money). But if you truly enjoy earning money and building massive quantities of personal wealth, the surroundings in which you build such wealth are immaterial.
EDIT: It seems that the price of this property has increased to $6,650,000 within the span of a day. I wonder what that is all about? Is the exposure on my tiny little blog worth a cool 150k? Hell, are they tracking the number of linking pages and adjusting the price in proportion to the property’s web exposure? Certainly easy to disprove, but I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader.
Don’t be discouraged if you come up with a great idea only to find it’s already taken by a successful company. Rather than being disappointed, take it as an indication that you’re capable of coming up with lucrative ideas on your own!
Noncomedogenic (adjective): not tending to produce laughter.
Source: A bottle of shampoo.