Jaded

Take the Q42 bus from Union Turnpike heading

to Union Turnpike-Kew Gardens

Take the F train to W 14th St – 6 Av 

Walk above ground, and figure it out.

Hopstop can only help you so much as to get you to the general vicinity. The rest is up to you.

Yesterday afternoon, this was me. I had an appointment to be at by 5 PM, but wanted to get there by 4 PM. It was for a tattoo, so I wanted to be there first to make sure I was attended to. That meant getting on the bus in Queens by 3 PM.

 A man attempts to entertain the hurried train riders.

This is the type of commute that hundreds of thousands of people do every single day. They do this during rush hour, in packed trains where it is easy to get irritable. They do this when they have a very imperative objective: be there on time. There is not time to stare and laugh at silly (or talented) performers, and there is no safety assurance in reaching in your pocket to give a bum a dollar.

It is no wonder they are so jaded.

I was expecting to walk straight into the parlor from street level, but instead had to get buzzed into a second story apartment to find it.

I spoke to the receptionist, to assure me that 5 o’clock was a good time to come back. My friend and I walked two blocks to Union Square Park after grabbing a Subway sandwich, and enjoyed the beautiful weather, just as so many other New Yorkers were doing.

We ate and “people-watched.” We watched people, and they could have watched us too. As a bum walked by singing Christina Aguilera, my friend and I watched and laughed. Some others did, and some others didn’t.

It’s years and years of seeing this everyday, of knowing that this sometimes needs to be ignored because there is a more important things about the day, that makes people simply disinterested.

Union Square Park is a very popular place on sunny days.
source: http://islandwoo.com

I’m still young and can still appreciate it. But as Baz Luhrmann said in his famous commencement speech “Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.”

This is a beautiful, fruitful, unique city. Residents eventually learn that it is too normal to be exciting. People focus in the annoying tourists, the loud horns, the hours of traffic, the garbage, the high prices. All of these things cloud the dream city, making it more like Gotham.

The idea of having to be buzzed upstairs to get to a tattoo parlor alone is amazing. The space in New York City is unbelievably limited, yet we just keep building up and up and up to reach the sky.

It scares me to think that there are people who don’t soak in life, especially in this legendary city, every single day. It is such a unique experience to live here, and after too long, it gets mundane.

It may be an option to move west, but Luhrmann also warned against staying there to long because it will “make you soft.”

The truth is that this city is anything but mundane. People may not realize it while they're here, but the endless options of pizza shops and hours of stand still traffic are things you will miss when you leave.