I Fainted

Yesterday morning I fainted on the train. Again. Contrary to popular opinion, I happen to be a very petite lady.  My mother is the same way and has always been fainiting all over the place - at least almost fainting.  In March I fainted too - at the exact same time - right before getting off at Union Square which is my stop on the way to work. 

Being a fainter, (I can now call myself that, it sounds like painter which makes me sound artistic and interesting, right?) I am worried about a few things.  For one - I’m worried I will one day hit my skull, for another I think maybe I have a horrible disease and will die shortly.  Either way, I know I need to drink more fluids and eat a little in the morning.

What really got me though was the enormous amount of attention I received from this occurence.  A true Florence Nightengale lady who looked like she should be everyone’s mother propped me up on a seat from the floor and put my head between my legs and massaged my shoulders (!) until we got to Union Sq.  Then she helped me out and I almost fainted again up the stairs.  Of course, there was a  medical student right there who immediately layed me down and put my head on a big bag that felt like a fluffy wonderland given the circumstances.  He whipped out his stethoscope, took my heartbeat and demanded the crowd that had formed to give me sugar. I look up in my haze and hands are being thrust towards me with mints, gums, a granola bar, juice and some other Sean Connery looking man miraculously has a big bottle of cold water that he hands to me - James Bond himself gave me fluids. It was like Christmas! (but Christmas on some sort of hallucinogen).  I couldn’t talk very well either but I managed to get up and an MTA EMT dude asked if I wanted to go to the hospital. I politely declined.  I looked at my crowd of helpers and thanked them all profusely saying in a very drugged sounding voice “Thanksh you all so much, you are all SO niccee”. Whereupon a few of them gave a sympathetic chuckle.  The EMT walked me to the stairs leading to the world and I gave him a hug and he laughed as well.  I got to work in one piece somehow and plopped at my desk, stunned.

Anyway - I’m not saying that fainting is great - it feels horrendous before when you know it’s coming. It’s extremely panicky.  But hey, if I feel the need to be loved by strangers I can just not eat in the morning and I’ll get tons of attention! Kidding…I don’t want this to happen again, but I am very thankful that I managed to receive this amazing outpouring of love and help from people I’d never met and will unfortunately never see again.

 

 

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Whither We Wait (and Wither)

Here is a paper I wrote:

            Waiting is expecting something you choose to receive.  It is the time lapsed between your decision to acquire something (a want or need) and the time you actually get it.  No one is exempt from being in abeyance.  Like most things in New York City, waiting is much more severe here than anywhere else. It becomes your constant companion, ready to slow you down at every corner. New Yorkers are in a constant struggle of moving too fast within tiny spaces and a plethora of people.  Waiting is not what you want to be doing when you are in this fast paced metropolis of madness.

            It starts even before you leave your apartment.  In the many (very sub-par) living quarters you’ve had the good fortune of over-paying for, waiting occurs early in the morning with the shower. You stare longingly into the upright shoebox of a shower and dart fingers into the arctic stream every few seconds, each time hoping it will become at least room temperature.  You never call the super as this is futile, and would result in an extremely long wait on top of it all.  In the end if it doesn’t warm up, you give up and must leave the house still coated in last night’s bar grit. 

            When you walk out the front door, you must immediately wait at the end of the block for the light to change, and directly after that, the bike messenger who ignores traffic rules completely.  If you do not allow wait time for a bike messenger to run his red light, you risk getting sworn at loudly at the very least, and at the worst – rammed into at full force, causing you to meld together in a tangle of spokes, documents, and body parts.

            The subway system of New York City is the waiting wonderland.  Here, the stakes are much higher for the arrival of your need.  Everyone during rush hour seems to have the faces of little lizards. The eyes dart back and forth at rapid paces, they hide behind the big painted metal pillars and peek out every so often down the tunnel for the glimmer of light.  If you live where there are several lines on the same track, you must wait for that specific train. You need the C but three E trains pass.  The wait times in these scenarios are mentally damaging. Patience is not a virtue that is practiced often. During these waits, the mind of a commuting New Yorker goes through a series of imaginings that would be clinically psychotic under normal circumstances. You wish death upon the families of the MTA workers, envision fires igniting in your office building so being late will not matter anyway, and finally, you accept your fate of becoming unemployed, loveless, homeless, and dead.  When the C train does finally come however, all of that temporary insanity vanishes and you return to society. 

            Worse than waiting for things that simply fuel and transport you throughout the every day routine, are the things that you have waited for all your life.  Those who move to New York City have dreams.  Yes, you can make your dreams come true, but in the meantime there is a hell of a lot of waiting to do. Artists here for example, wait in line to audition, wait for a song lyric to manifest for a gig, wait for the agent who may or may not like your new opus.  As we wait for our beer to fill at that East Village dive, we wait for inspiration to take hold so we will finally “make it”.  We wait in layers because we want so much.  We wait for notoriety and wealth while we wait for the laundry cycle to end and the delivery boy to come.  We wait for the spring while we wait for the cab, wait for Friday to come while waiting for the Tuesday to end. 

Waiting for vacation is a very hard thing to do. You are waiting to leave the city, which is quite dramatic.  The week before it comes all you can do is think of how you are finally free.  You will be able to see something other than towering buildings watching you, you can breathe real air, and you can perhaps eat a meal that doesn’t cost as much as a television. You wait for the day when you can sleep all night without having siren induced mini heart attacks.

            The aura of New York while you wait can be lonely and wrought with hopelessness.  You can anonymously wait within a sea of people if you choose, or alone in the corner of a bar.  We all wait for love to arrive in this town.  On the one hand, it is a gargantuan city that is capable of throwing you endless possibilities, on the other hand, it can be like another dimension, where no one is real, no one has a soul, and everyone has an iPhone but you. You teeter in and out of different types of groups, the hipster party, the Wall Street event, that book signing, some political march.  Do you belong to any of these groups, or must you wait for your people to arrive, for your species to come rescue you?  When you do find love, you must to wait for it to blossom, to see if it sticks. Both parties are initially very frightened of the other’s intentions.  Will he invite me to his work thing, or do I embarrass him?  Will she call me after Yoga, or was she grossed out by my fake Armani suit?  They come to New York City from the opposite ends of the Earth, but end up here for the same reasons.  The one common goal of achieving success binds them, but that same goal can destroy them if it becomes more important than your lover.  When we wait in vain for a love to come around, New York feels like an evil island of soot and sadness. The city takes on whatever color your mood is.  Last week this café was lovely and you felt peaceful enjoying your book.  Now you come back and it is a cold wasteland where your phone rests idly on the table without any chance of ringing.  Your coffee tastes like the wall and the other patrons look like aged chimpanzees floating around you and gabbing while you understand nothing.

            In this city of purgatory, we wonder whether we’ll ever find contentment, peace, happiness, and love. We wonder how long we must wait for this, and if it will be all in vain in the end.  If we stick around long enough we will find out, won’t we?  Perhaps the key is making the wait worthwhile along the way, using that time to your advantage. Filling yourself with the city’s grand beauty while you wait can save you in the end.  Instead of hating the waiting, use it for observation and introspection.  Perhaps this way it ceases to be waiting, and becomes merely a quiet pause in your day in which to reflect about things that will come your way.  This city is illuminating and grotesque, smelly and sweet, rapturous and hellacious.  As we wait for what we came here for we can choose to use the time for the better or let the wait wither you away.

 

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Woman Of This City

That is the gayest title for a blog ever - sorry.  It’s honest though.  One of my courses (I’m back in academia once again) is called “Writing New York”.  We read Luc Sante, Whitman, Chester Hines, and more.  What is so wonderful about this course is that it allows me to compare all of my experiences and perceptions with those other writers.  Finding similarities in these writers’ stories with my own life here is like finding a friend, like finding a fellow drinker at the bar who just had the same day you just had.

I’ve never been so ready to delve into a class.  A wonderful part is that it seems I’ve been taking this class, on my own for years. I’ve always been fascinated with NYC’s history, it’s people, it’s men, it’s buildings, it’s intensity, it’s sickness. 

I build my own bridges as I walk on the bridges of this city.  New York builds me up, and it shits me out and it breaks me down and builds a bank in my stead.  Why woman of the city as a particular theme?  Well I’m not trying to be a Sex and the City retard here - but there is something different about being a female New Yorker.  First of all, there aren’t too many women who have actually written about New York. There is not one book I’m reading in class that is written by a woman, although there are some poems and essays within the anthologies we have.

I vie today to become a female New York City writer.  I know there are others, but not enough in my opinion…and far too few who aren’t named Candice Bushnell or Lauren Weisberger (google them if you don’t know who they are).  I want to write about New York the real way, the multi-cultural, multi-class, multi-psychosis way that happens to you and to others by being here.  I want to show people that this city can make a woman offended by a disgusting cat call and lifted up to the status of a CEO in the same day.  That my smiles are few and far between on a general walk around the block, but dazzle in the midst of friends, and when I have lived out a fantasy that you can only have in this city.

I’ll leave you with all with a poem:

I’m sorry e.e. cummings, but I’ve stepped in on your verbiage

Like stone masons I haul rocks around my neighborhood waiting for something to take it away -

Locked I can’t go into the twenty-four hour superette when all I wanted was some stupid wrapped cake to ease my sugar needs

Shamed and defeated by such base human need I yearn for primal and rational to fuse more.

Don’t want my need to shit to conflict with my important documents. 

Instead I’ll hold it in until Happy Hour so I can be care-free.

 

 

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