Merrily, Merrily

Week two’s over in New York, and the most reoccurring thought I’ve had is “I’ve been duped.” After a fall quarter of waking up, toiling away on homework before class, wolfing down some rice and beans after class in order to get straight to homework so that I can fall asleep on time to finish my homework the next morning, I feel like I’ve emerged from a stinky subway platform, and into a proverbial city of real life.

It occurred to me that my affinity for this city is equal parts lack of homework and legitimate love for New York itself. Since I last wrote, I sat in on a meeting with former British MP and Scottish Parliament hopeful, “Gorgeous” George Galloway, saw the Budapest Festival Orchestra play the Lincoln Center, ate raw octopus wasabi ceviche, attended a warrior paint party, went to an experimental music and dance performance, took the metro to Coney Island to eat Uighur food, went on an epic thrift store excursion, met the only reporter present at the MLK shooting, read the New York Times cover to cover, and walked from Wall Street to Chelsea all while working 40 hours a week… because I didn’t have homework! It is glorious. I realize that expounding over 10 pages about Hawtorne’s bacchic symbolism in Maypole of Merry Mount might help me develop my… wait, what?! I don’t regret going to school, but I am less distressed and more adrenalized for graduation with every day I spend devouring this city.

When I first arrived, I found New York impossible to grasp. Even while thousands of feet above the lights in an airplane, you can never look upon the city as a whole. This intimidated me at first, but its vastness is accepted rather than conquered by tourists and locals alike. Ironically, it takes less cognitive effort to navigate the city on the serpentine tangle of metro lines than day-to-day transportation in Ann Arbor. I find I can slip on my headphones, space out and even sing along, reveling in my anonymity. I am one in eight million gliding with the current and no one gives a damn. As soon as I assumed this nonchalance, people started asking me for directions daily.

Home, by contrast, is a six-story den filled with warm light and conversation [pictured]. Kids in the program have internships ranging from ballet administration, to sports journalism at The Daily News, to working for Saturday Night Live’s music department. Everyone comes home tired and filled with funny stories. Apparently Nicki Minaj rolls very deep, and Peewee Herman invokes intense consternation upon contact.

I have yet to meet any major celebrities on the job with Pacifica, but it’s exhilarating all the same. Today, the doorman called me “Zeke,” and I felt like a Wall Street fat cat riding the high-speed elevator up to the tenth floor. The fund drive starts tomorrow, so we’re nearing the home stretch on collecting counter-culture premiums to offer listeners. That has taken up most of my time over the last couple weeks, and the strange fruits of my labor are arriving in boxes labeled “Curing Cancer from the Inside Out” and “The Mafia Principle of Global Hegemony.”

Tomorrow, the phone lines open for what is sure to be nine hours of hardcore fund driving (whatever that might entail), but for now, I’m off with a couple housemates to sip tea and stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge.