a boring person goes to new york

one

from my writing, 2018:

the contrast between boston and new york has always been in my psyche, apparently. my earliest visits to new york were in 2018, when i flew there before going to boston for promys, and when i came back before flying to manila. it was, at the time, secondary to boston, which was where the action happened. it was always a liminal place, a transition period, never a destination in itself.

that was also back when i took buses between new york and boston, those lucky star buses from chinatown. i’ve disfavored them over the years, due to motion sickness, preferring to take the amtrak instead. that’s what discretionary income does to a person i guess.

i used to think i was above lifestyle creep because i came from a middle-class, third-world background. humble beginnings, right? i had to build all my money from scratch, though mit’s generous financial aid didn’t hurt.

but there’s a mindset that i feel like i’m in, now, which i think i picked up in new york, where the cold calculus treats the cost difference of the amtrak and a bus ride as infinitesimal. i’ll take the bus three stops than walk twelve minutes, even if i haven’t hit my weekly omny fare cap, because three dollars is an even smaller amount. when i eat out, i avoid the places where the prices look like they’re above 50 a person, but once i’m at a place, the prices don’t mean anything. they’re there, ambiently, but most of the time they’re only numbers. in my first us visits, every meal’s cost appalled me, and i had to stop myself from automatically converting everything to pesos.

now, i can afford to ignore the numbers, and that is a weird feeling.

perhaps it’s dangerous to be so blasé about prices, when i live in one of the world’s most expensive cities. perhaps i shouldn’t eat out for every meal. but also… i dunno. i’m blessed with a ridiculous amount of money

two

from In Which I Turn to Words, 2019:

i’ve been reading infinite jest, lately, and the way wallace anchors the book to boston is striking. is it the landmarks mentioned every other sentence, perhaps? the mount auburn cemetery, newbury street, mit, the east cambridge stop on the green line, central square? is it the on-point descriptions of the weather or the t? or is it more of an attitude, the way people behave, something in the conversations and interactions?

my naive read of new york, years ago, was read from the architecture and sidewalks of downtown manhattan. you’ll forgive my borough bias, but i do live around kips bay. some of these places are embedded in my mind now. i saw the air rights wikipedia page and recognized a building i’ve walked past. the opening line of ed sheeran’s happier, “walking down 29th and park,” is now something i’ve done. there’s a litany of tourist attractions i ignore every day.

and yes, all those new york complaints are true. dirty and dingy, derelict and decayed, drenched and damp. i stand by these descriptions. you can’t dismiss it, but you can get desensitized to it.

but there are still moments of awe and stillness. like walking down a random empty street, enclosed by buildings ten times my height. or in the subway, another place i’ve felt beauty, maybe in the form of a woman who handed me tissue, or through people calling for help for someone who collapsed, or through the skyline behind the slate steel girders of williamsburg bridge.

and speaking of the subway, have i ever talked about that time a friend and i visited every station on the mta? i suppose those twenty-nine hours have been mentioned in passing. but yes, alan and i tackled the subway challenge together. by the twenty-sixth hour i was on the verge of collapsing. maybe it’s the sleep deprivation. but in that moment, taking the train at three in the morning, when the city’s earliest workers started their days—that moment, new york felt like home. there is awe in new york’s wonders, yes; but to the willing and ready, there is awe in its mundane.

three

from a boring friday, 2022:

how much did that end up panning out? it’s true that i spend a lot of time hanging out with nearby friends. look at my calendar! see how many times i grab dinner with friends in a week. helps that there’s lots of great places to eat at; in boston it was always the same six restaurants. see how many times i say yes to an invitation to do something. see how many times i go to a friend’s apartment to hang out, or watch tv, or play board games, or talk.

there’s another claim in this quote, though. the claim that i can’t bear living far from my friends. because i do live far from the majority of my friends, and, well, i’m alive, right? i don’t know. in practice, i don’t know how much that matters. i’ve been going through these phases where i don’t want to be around anyone. weekends where i want to stay in my room and do things, alone.

it’s rare that i regret going out to see people. but often, when i do go out, there’s a small worry that i might have more fun doing something else. it’s rare that i ache for friends to be around, on the nights i do spend alone. but often when i am alone there’s a tinge of a thirst for companionship. relationship. friendship. a vessel that’ll toss me a lifejacket before i drown in this sea of thoughts.

part of me wants to believe that my friends are fungible. not in the sense that people are replaceable, no, but in the sense that i can have good times with the friends who are near me, no matter which of my friends they are. because you don’t have nostalgia for situations or contexts; that’s never the proximal cause. you have nostalgia for specific feelings, for kinds of experiences. and if i can access the same joys, if i can feel the same fulfillment, the same ease, with the people who are nearby, then should it matter if i have friends who live far away?

that much is theory. but the feelings are different, here. the joys are similar, and the fulfillment i can find elsewhere, but the ease? the ease is scarce. always some urgency. back-to-back scheduled events. dinner in sharply-cut sixty-minute blocks. never lingering, never lounging. dahil hindi ko na kayang maging tambay sa kanto, diba? at least yung mga tambay may kasama. walang nagtatambay na mag-isa.

am i making these memories up? how much of the nights i’ve spent sitting down on the floorpi lounge, on my laptop, doing work with others; or the days i’ve spent hanging out in the esp office, psetting with others; or the times i’ve spent in the front rooms at et, playing video games; or the meetings i’ve spent in the admissions office, working on blog posts; how much of these things were real? how much did those experiences matter to me? how much do i wish i had that here, in new york, where the only coworking i do is when i’m in the office doing actual work? and how much would that have been different if i had, instead, stayed in boston, or lived in sf, or—

four

from circles circles circles, 2023:

that didn’t happen. many of the things i do are the things i’ve already been doing.

i still go square dancing, most friends outside of work are people i know from mit, i still contribute problems to the noi and pmo, i write and work on puzzles with galactic. these circles have been the same. some of these circles have shrunk. some of these circles have disappeared. and are there any new circles? i don’t know. maybe there’s the rhythm gamers. or the people i went to mosc with, though that’s less of a new circle and more like rekindling an old one.

none of these things are inherently new york. the only thing tying them here is physicality. which is a pretty strong tie, but it’s not an intrinsic one. why couldn’t i be doing something similar elsewhere, why does new york have to be special? it’d be a different story if i participated in something that was uniquely new york, like recurse or fractal, if i went to the riichi nomi meetups, if i took improv classes at upright citizens brigade.

the “new york things” i do in my circles, are, i dunno. eat. take the trains. go to a museum or two. walk around. things you can do in many other cities, but it’s less boring because it’s in new york, right? i’m half-facetious, but there is something about new york having a huge variety of food, and having okay public transit, and having lots of density, because the nyc ethos is cramming things into small spaces.

consider railroad apartments: where you might have to pass by another person’s bedroom to get to the kitchen. or bodegas: convenience stores with things stacked to the ceiling and narrow crammed aisles, with space often doubling as a deli. or rush hour: when the buses can always fit one more person, one more person, one more person.

maybe it’s no coincidence that my circles are getting smaller and smaller. on the plus side, the density means that my dentist is right around the block.

the other nyc ethos seems to be motion. sometimes that motion is slow. our subway is the slowest among us heavy rail systems; the m102 during rush hour averages slower than a fluttering butterfly. sometimes that motion is fast. the skewers place around the corner i loved closed without warning, and there’s no sign it’ll reopen. a building i used to walk past in my commute grew by fifteen stories. the 63 st line closed, had all its tracks ripped out and replaced, and reopened. all in the span of a few months. the city’s merciless speed of change rivals mit.

i’m growing in the city, and i’ve already started complaining about how some things used to be better. will i one day walk through the ghosts of the new york that once was? will i one day complain about the city leaving me behind, in the same way that mit’s left me behind? or maybe i need to keep up myself. i can’t be a boring person here. i have to keep moving, faster, faster, until the time dilation and length contraction kick in, and i can cram yourself into smaller and smaller spaces. relativity proves what new yorkers already know to be true: if you move fast enough, you start to feel small.

five

from my writing, 2024:

and who has time to think about these kinds of things? about where they live and how they feel about it? about what they’re doing and whether they like it? don’t ask the armor-piercing questions. don’t stop to analyze it. live it, do it, burn the days one-by-one. who needs goals? who needs a purpose? who needs to accomplish things? because that’s how my life is going right?

always okay,
always meh,
always alright.
never good,
never great,
always fine.
but that’s all.
it’s fine.
i spend days
in this malaise;
nothing interesting
ever happens to me.
and no news,
(as they say)
is good news.

what a shame. what a shame for my life to have peaked behind me, that all my interesting stories are from when i was in high school. what shame to be making interesting things but not being interesting. what a shame to be a boring person in an interesting city.