scientifically nyc

going through old writing wondering if i might stumble across a masterpiece i was previously too immature to recognize (that's what they'll do after my death anyway, so...), and instead stumbled across a better reminder of why i write. i write to remember. many forgotten slices of my life have been replaced in the heart of me today, including this little tribute to my love affair with nyc...

(June 5, 2003: from the Starbucks series)

Just spent Saturday night hanging out with the homeless intelligentsia at my local Starbucks. The ‘bucks on Astor Place is 24-hours and has a complete culture of its own. i would even call it an ecosystem. 60% loners with wandering eyes, writers with pen and paper, geeks with macs, book readers - always on their own; 20% homeless or semi-homeless, because they quite literally live in starbucks and all know each other and have for decades; and 20% people who just want to have coffee with a friend or lover or elicit affair person or stranger.


you know which category i fit into. so, tonight i took my Learning Hebrew books to Starbucks, as i do one night a week, and spent hours talking to myself while memorizing letters and verbs and sentences and conjugations.

it's not that i didn't notice the bulging group of homeless men at the next table (they are all remarkably literate, always discussing literature and politics). it's just that we are all part of the same ecosystem in there, and i don't mind them and they don't mind me. and it's not that i didn't overhear their conversation turn to the moral character of Jews, and the global consequences of an Israel, or fail to sense the tension mounting as two camps emerged among them and dug into their trenches. it's just that i can't go moving tables just because mine is littered with Hebrew-emblazoned scrap paper and textbooks. that would be victim-complexish, and i decided many years ago that i would not perpetuate that particular cultural tendency.

anyway, they noticed me soon enough. "excuse me ma'am, you jewish?" (young black kid who likes to point at people with his umbrella and pretend to shoot them), "yes, i am", "aaa... medaberet ivrit?" (50+ year old, seemingly highly educated, homeless israeli dude who walks slowly with a cane, asking if i speak hebrew), "lo, ani lomedet ivrit" (“no, but i am learning"), "you ashkenazi?" (kevin: intense 30+/40+ irish guy, possibly homeless, definitely unemployed, who is always there, day or night, in the same corner, typing with enormous conviction on his rather nice laptop, always wearing the same clothes, always wearing the same hat, and whom people approach and treat like a Godfather, the don corleone of Astor Place. kevin remembers everything he reads and is an enormous conspiracy theorist. he starts his sentences with "i have information that..." or "i received information that..."), "yes..."

spent the next 30 minutes debating whether the holocaust was the jews’ own fault, whether jews own the IMF, and whether sephardis are truly (Kevin: "scientifically") jewish.

when three more heavily matted and somewhat less domesticated street czars come over and nodded at Kevin, i started feeling that maybe I was a very small, very female fish in an increasingly strange fishbowl. I packed up my hebrew papers, waved my bye byes, and walked the 20 feet to my apartment.

it's great to be home, but it was great to be with them, too. they made my night. and they won for new york city a little piece more of my heart.

i mean, where else is this a normal saturday night for a girl like me?

i really, really, really love this town.

eliminating time

When I got back, she was meditating. I knew she was aware of me, and I wondered if she was conflicted about having disappeared for 40 minutes.

True, we had just met on the plane. True, we may never see each other again. But we had come to the business class lounge together (I could have gone to the BA lounge, but casually joined her at Cathay Pacific instead), and there was something impolite about her having vanished without an explanation. Wasn’t there?

And now she had returned from whatever had taken priority. But by then, I had decided that I would move on, too.

“Hello,” I said, when she opened her eyes. I was packing up my laptop.

“Hey hey…” came the cheery reply.

“I’m going to get moving to my gate. It’s at the other side of the airport,” I said, trying to keep an even tone.

“Oh, right,” she said, and again, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“How was your shower?” she asked, and I liked that she remembered I had wanted to take a shower. And then she asked about the weather in London. Then she made a joke, or maybe it was me.

Anyway, twenty minutes later we were comparing 20-year projections on European society. We disagreed on how the world may rebuild itself after the Ultimate War (would it be with or without religion?). We agreed that a major conflict was possible (“likely”, she said) in our lifetime. I noticed we were whispering, but didn't have to.

By the time we ascended the escalator, her flight was 10 minutes from takeoff. She seemed calm, but I think amusement was just her form of nervousness.

I’m guessing she made her plane. But I still wonder where she went for 40 minutes of our broken destiny. And I wonder what kind of a person thinks of meditating in a crowded, buttoned up lounge, surrounded by CNN plasma screens, moving tickers of down-turned arrows, and the clinking soundtrack of gluttony and restlessness and eliminating time.