Tag Archives: nyc

NYC

Open Letter to the M Train Media Baron

Dear person,

mtrain.jpgYou don’t know me, nor should you, but we ride the same train to work in the morning. I get on in a grubby section of Queens, while you get on in Williamsburg. I’d never had the pleasure of meeting you until this morning, when the the train reached Lorimer Street, and I heard your braying voice the moment the doors opened. You were talking on your cell phone, to your mother, apparently, and very loudly.

I don’t like to listen to other people’s phone conversations, but since you stood right in front of me and decided to talk in a ludicrously loud tone of voice, it was impossible to ignore you. I could tell you were Someone Important, because right off the bat you mentioned two extremely popular cable TV shows, and made it clear that you worked for the network airing those shows (even though you were talking to your mother, who presumably knew this already).

Apparently, one of these shows, which just debuted to rave reviews, was experiencing an inordinate amount of traffic on its Web site. Or rather, the person in charge of said Web site had not prepared for such traffic and was getting slammed. But rather than tax his/her staff or outsource the issue, this person was trying to handle the issue him/herself.

I don’t know why I’m obscuring the gender of this person, since you mentioned his/her name many, many times, at top volume, like everything else you said. You also made sure to mention that you knew all this because you received an email you weren’t supposed to, which you then proceeded to forward to other folks, just for laughs.

This surprised me. I have friends who work in various media. Sometimes they work on Very Important Things and they can’t tell me the exact details. And I accept this because, hey, who knows who might be sitting in that next booth or in the bus seat next to me? You, clearly, are not limited by such discretion.

But the thing that really set me off, really brought it all together for me, and made me write this letter, is when you said to your mother, “I don’t have time for this! I’m a 32-year-old girl!”

Yes, you are. You are a child. Your job, which is evidently very important (though not important enough for you to wear anything nicer than sneakers) is just a toy to you. If I had a job like yours, first of all, I’d be thrilled. But I’d also be very careful about bitching about any aspect of it in public.

As you yakked away, I wrote several tweets about your phone call. I could just as easily fired off an email to a certain Web site that likes to trade in media gossip like this (hint: it rhymes with Mawker). And thanks to your detailed descriptions, it wouldn’t take too much googling to find out who you are or the full names and titles of all the other principals you complained about at length.

And that might get you fired, but what the hell! You’d just flit to some other joke-job, or you’d couch surf for a while, or maybe finally go to India or something, you know, really learn about yourself. Your life has zero stakes, and based on the fact that you were having this conversation with your mother, you were clearly raised with zero stakes, too. I’m 100 percent positive you come from money and privilege, and the reason you’re yapping at top volume on the train is because this job is just to keep you in beer and coke money. You could lose it tomorrow and not feel a thing.

My life has nothing but stakes. I come from no one. I grew up with very little. I was able to go to college only because I earned a scholarship (and took out some oppressive loans), and I went to every goddamn class because I was terrified of losing that scholarship. I’ve spent every day of my adult life working or hustling to get work.

I have a wife and a child. I can’t bitch about anything I do for pay because if I do and I get fired, I have zero safety net. I can’t pull up stakes and crash at a friend’s place or live in my mom’s basement for a while or move to a commune.

That’s because I’m an adult, and I pity you. I have more obligations than you can possibly imagine, and yet I write every god damn day. I have more things to do that I don’t want to do than ever before, and yet I’m working on more projects of my own than I ever have ever before.

But you, you will do nothing of value with your life, because you don’t have to. You will create nothing and bring joy to noone, because you don’t have to. You will never do anything you don’t have to, because you’re a “32-year-old girl”, and children don’t do things they don’t want to do.

I meet people like you a lot. They’re my age or thereabouts, and when I tell them I have a kid, a look of abject terror flits across their faces for a split second. It’s not the idea of being a parent that scares them. It’s the idea of having any sort of responsibility, of having to live in a world in which their id isn’t constantly satisfied. “You mean I can’t just sick out for a few days and go to Bonaroo?”

Do you have to have a kid to be an adult? Of course not. I would say all of my friends are adults, and very few of them have children. To be an adult, you have to have a sense of the world outside yourself. You clearly have none of that, or else you wouldn’t be yelling about your job (which many people would kill for) at top volume on the subway.

I know you are highly unlikely to read this, and even if you did, my words would be unlikely to change you in any appreciable way. I just want you to know that your life is completely and utterly meaningless, without a single redeeming feature, and one day you’re gonna die alone and afraid, just like the rest of us. Cheers!

— Me

NYC

Now It Is You Who Are Wrong

bikes.jpgI hate when people/things I like attract people who are jerks. Fandom is a perfect example of this phenomenon. As a fan of a certain team, you want to believe that your fellow fans of said team are righteous, caring souls. And then you go to the stadium to see a game a realize, “Jesus, there are a lot of douches in this place.” Every time I think Mets fans are somehow morally superior to partisans of That Other Team, I remember that Bill O’Reilly is a Mets fan.

I am pro-bike. I don’t really bike myself, but I have a lot of friends who use bikes as their primary mode of transportation. I like that the city has installed bike-only lanes along the Brooklyn waterfront. I like that the idiot cop who senselessly laid into a Critical Mass biker was found guilty of lying about his report on the incident.

Unfortunately, my recent interactions with bikers in the street–both as a pedestrian and a driver/passenger–tell me that bikers are just as capable of being assholes as anyone else.

Incident Number 1: Most days, I ride the bus to work in the morning. The tail end of my commute goes down Navy Street, right by the main approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. Navy Street is split down the middle by a dedicated bike lane. On this particular morning, both my bus and a biker reached the intersection of Navy and Gold right at the same time, at a point where the bus turns left. The biker, paying absolutely no attention at all, keeps speeding on, nearly smacking into the side of the bus.

In a huff, the biker hops off his bike. He has wavy blond hair, a full red face, and khaki shorts, like Hansel all grown. He points to a sign at the intersection, screaming CAN’T YOU READ?! The sign in question indicated no left turns. But had he himself kept reading, he would have seen the bottom part of the sign, which says EXCEPT BUSES. Obliviously, he sped on, making sure to take the most circuitous route possible around the bus to delay us all as punishment. The light had changed by this point, so he was holding up traffic in all directions.

Incident Number 2: I’m in Greenpoint, walking down Meserole Street. As I reach an intersection, at a one-way street that has a stop sign, a biker is speeding like mad, with no intention of stopping. He sees me and slams on his brakes, a few feet short of me. I’m startled, but say nothing and move on. He starts up again, makes a left on Meserole (going the wrong way down a one-way street) and screams at me as he passes, I SKIDDED FOR YOU, YOU’RE WELCOME.

I should thank you for not ignoring all the traffic laws and barreling into me? Sure. That reminds me to thank everyone else I saw today for not stabbing me in the face.

NYC

The 24,000th Saddest Thing I’ve Ever Seen

This past weekend, our neighborhood had a street fair. The Wife and I usually refer to street fairs as Tube Sock Festivals, because unless they have a specific purpose/theme, they consist of booth after booth of people selling tube socks. Or little fridge magnets shaped like food. Or badly woven wall tapestries dedicated to Tupac. Nothing but dumb, cheap junk.

Still, The Baby hadn’t been out of the house all day. Two-year-olds are a lot like dogs–you need to bring them outside every few hours or they will make you pay for it. (Although with a kid, peeing on the carpet is the least of your worries.) So we decided to take a stroll to the street fair and check out the latest in roasted corn technology.

Another thing street fairs have a lot of: cheap, dumb rides. Usually the inflatable kind, where little kids can jump up and down on plastic mattresses manned by 14 year olds who don’t look like the best guardians of children’s safety.

I brought The Baby to one of the Inflatable Ball Pits of Doom, and asked the kid in charge where to buy the tickets that granted her admission. I swear this kid didn’t speak English. I don’t mean he was foreign; I mean I don’t think he was smart enough to ‘get’ speech. Like he crawled out of the woods, the member of some obscure tribe as yet undiscovered by anthropologists, who only communicate in grunts, gestures, and punching.

But before we got to the Inflatable Death Traps, I saw another quote-unquote ride that immediately filled me with sadness. I have a hard time recalling the scene now. I remember each individual detail, but all together they don’t add up to a sane picture. Still, here it is.

The ride was literally on the back of a truck. Not a flatbed truck, but a pickup truck, painted fire engine red. The paint lacked any sort of sheen, and its dullness added to this scene’s pathetic feeling. Contained in the truck’s bed was a pirate ship-type ride

pirateship.jpgI’m sure you’ve seen rides like this at fairs or in a carnival or down the shore (like this example to your right). They’re boat-shaped or large semicircles with rows of seats on each side of a pivot that rocks the ride from one side to the other. Basically, it’s a really big swing. But in the version you normally see, the ride is big enough to pitch you 20-30 feet in the air and pin you to your seat with G forces.

The mini-version I saw was not big enough to do this. Not even close. At best, the riders got six to seven feet above the truck bed. Even that estimate might be generous. With so little room to work with, the ride could only manage tiny little arcs, like it was trying back into a very tight parking spot.

Even crazier: this ride was manned by three people. One older gentleman stood the back of the bed, arms folded, not doing much of anything. Another attendant, who looked all of 15 years old, stood in the exact middle of the ride, providing some much needed ballast. A third attendant stood opposite him, just outside the ride.

At first, it looked as if this third attendant was grasping a few crucial beams that held the swing to the pivot. Like he was literally holding the ride together. Or worse, as if he was the guy moving the ride back and forth. I noted this to The Wife and we chuckled, because of course that was absurd.

But as we got closer, we saw to our horror that this third man was, in fact, the power behind the ride. He was swinging it back and forth, all for the entertainment of five or six bored-looking kids (the ride couldn’t possibly hold any more). We stifled our laughs right away and moved past the ride as fast we could, ashamed.

What struck me about this scene was that no one in it looked happy. In my own mental backstory, the three attendants represented three generations of a carnival ride business. The oldest man wanted to retire, but the economy and his pride wouldn’t let him. The youngest just wanted to hang out with his friends and resented working with his family for the summer. And the man in the middle never wanted to be in this business in the first place, but the time to quit came and went a long time ago.

And the kids on the ride looked just as unhappy. It reminded me of when I was a kid, and my dad would bring home some knockoff toy he bought from a table in the Hoboken train station. Like a Transfirmer, or a handheld video game called Pacri-Man (seriously). I would feel bad for dad, for not knowing the difference between the real thing and a cheap knockoff. I would feel bad for the poor slobs in Nowhereistan putting this garbage together. But I would mostly feel bad for me, for having to pretend like I liked this thing and play with it.

Mind you, I looked at this scene for about 20 seconds tops. And in those 20 seconds, I absorbed a Chekhov play’s amount of sadness.