Day 18 - NYC

Thoughts

New York created a Pavlovian response in me. Stimulus: Car horn   Reaction: INSTANT BIRD FLIPPING. I fucking HATE car horns. I wear headphones at all possible times when I'm out alone in order to combat and keep my sanity against the constant onslaught of car horns. I lost patience with it pretty quickly in my time here and my middle finger decided that it had a lot to say on the topic of drivers blaring their horns. After years of this I came to realize that the action off flipping off the driver of said horn honking vehicle was elevated from reaction to reflex. The inital split second where one thinks "Fuck you I really want to flip you off right now" before enacting the action no longer existed. I now go straight from car horn to a fuck you display, many times without even realizing it or looking around to see where the car actually is. Car horn? Finger in the air. Instant reflex.

I have developed a 'Fuck You Reflex'.

At the end of my first summer here I was pretty miserable but I was lucky enough to have been given a month or two of acting work out of the city in a small town in Missouri. The bonus about work in Missouri was that I was close enough to home to take advantage of my favorite midwest perk: a car loaned to me by my parents. I love driving. I love love love love love it. I love the independence of it, the barrier bubble it creates from the rest of the living world, and the ability to sing as loud as I damn well please to whatever (usually shitty) music I choose. It was in one of those first days in Missouri that I realized what was missing in my still new-ish New York life. Music as I move.

I returned to NYC from that job with a fully stocked mp3 player. It was a complete game changer. It was the barrier I needed in order to handle the endless amount of stimuli that circled around in the air. Annoyed? Frustrated? Turn up the music! Ahhhhhh. Instant Relaxation Injection. It was an amazing fix. However, happiness for relief turned into dependency for survival as time went on. If the battery died on my shuffle I would feel a massive amount of panic rise in my chest (admittedly...this still occurs). Though I would easily say it was the most important survival weapon I found to combat New York (I would never have lasted four years here without it), I do believe it effectively made me miss out on a large part of the city. When you cut out one of the senses you rely on for experience you don't really get the full experience. I got visuals and smells of New York with a soundtrack, but rarely did I have the patience or interest in getting the full experience of New York. Not like I care all that much because my little shuffle is still my most prized NYC possession...meaning I guess I was never all that interested in fully experiencing New York in the first place... (more on that another day I'm sure) but admittedly, when there is lack of sound, there is also a surprising lack of sight. I stopped taking in, I stopped observing, I merely put my head down and carried on to get from Point A to Point B with Feist, Hot Chip, Laura Marling and Brooke Waggoner as my walking buddies. I missed almost everything. Rather, I didn't stop to appreciate any of it.

In the last six months or so I have been able to handle the city sans musical barriers. Nowadays I (shockingly) every once in awhile I find myself WANTING to turn off my music and allow the city in. It's a very different experience. What I noticed most is that the city actually does have splashes of color. Without the sounds I was never compelled to look for it before. It wasn't exactly the gray concrete prison I had made it out to be. Still confining, still claustrophobic, but there were spots of beauty! I just never had the courage to find them.

I've made a promise to myself that this practice will die within the confines of this city. It is a habit I plan to leave behind because, unlike New York, I actually want to experience all that San Francisco has to offer. I want to hear what the bums say to me, I want to take in the sounds of the eclectic neighborhoods and the unpredictable conversations one picks up walking down the street. Car horns don't even bother me in San Francisco. My 'fuck you' reflex doesn't seem to exist there. I am more than willing to leave my 'fuck you' reflex behind.