Everybody!

How about another list:

1) Everybody here wears black. I'm not sure how to characterize it, but there is a particular look to the way people dress. One year back when I was in high school, we went to New York for Thanksgiving, and I remember my stepdad Jim observing that everybody dressed in dark colors. They’re still doing it. Not only is the dress generally dark, but it’s generally… kind of shabby and self-consciously awful. Everybody’s bluejeans are dirty and frayed at the bottom. The mens jackets all fit a little too tight, but their sweater sleeves are a little too long. The girls wear old lady clothes and lots of bobby pins in their hair. It’s weird, and if I were going to try to do it myself, I don’t think I could pull it off. I’d probably need to stop wearing all the brightly-colored ski clothes I got used to up in New Hampshire.

2) Everybody in Williamsburg ought to be a straight guy, because man, are there a lot of cute girls here (and I use "cute girls," rather than, say, "attractive women" deliberately. These are cute girls.) And man, are they hanging out with a lot of homely guys. Oh well.

3) Everybody in Brooklyn was on my commute train this morning. I remember this Richard Scarry book I had when I was a kid that showed how people (in the form of clothed, bipedal animals) from all over the world lived. There was a picture of people piling onto the commuter trains in Tokyo, where the subway attendents had to squeeze people into the trains to get the doors closed, like you’d sit on an overpacked suitcase to get it zipped. (I can't remember whether the Tokyo commuters were cats or dogs… you’d think that’s the kind of thing you’d remember. Are Japanese people more like cats or dogs, you think?) Anyway, it was like that. Lots of stranger-touching. Not that I’m complaining really; stranger-touching is about the best action I'm getting these days. But it was different.

4) Everybody in my neighborhood is coupled. It's nauseating. They clog up the sideway traffic, walking arm-in-arm, all slow-like, because who can really walk fast while you’re hanging onto your girlfriend's ass? Even the non-romantic types are coupled, apparently. When I go into the grocery store, everyone's shopping in pairs. Even the straight-guy roommate duos (yes, you can tell). Who does that? And why? Did I mention that the whole room is refrigerated?

5) Everybody's in such a goddam rush to get on the train. Let’s take a hypothetical: what do you do when you’re waiting for an elevator and you’re not an asshole? I’ll tell you what - when the door opens, you wait for exiting people to get off the elevator, and then you get on, and if you were the first one there waiting on the elevator, you stand a good chance of being the first one to get on it. You’d think it’d work the same way on the subway, but it does not. Even when an obviously full train is just waiting to spill its passengers, people are trying to climb on the second the doors open. And you could be standing there with your nose literally touching the doors and no one else around, and the instant before they open, at least two people will worm up in front of you and dart on the train before you. The same thing applies on the street. If you come to the intersection and there’s a "don’t-walk" signal, and you step off the sidewalk, a little bit into the first lane of traffic to wait for the light to turn, I guarantee that the next person to come up and wait will step just a little bit in front of you, even if they end up standing in the middle of the street to get there. I don't get it.

6) Everybody only takes cash. The grocery store, they only take cash. The video store, they only take cash. The subway machine actually takes cards, but I couldn’t make it work, so effectively, it only takes cash. In principle, I think this is a good thing since they’d only be entering my purchases into some giant evil database anyway if I were paying with a card, and of course, the cash, it encourages good budgeting habits. But it’s not so easy to work with when you’re waiting on that first paycheck.

7) It was raining like crazy this morning, and everybody was trying to put my damn eyes out with their stupid umbrellas.

8) Everybody who has a good public radio station in their community should thank their lucky stars because here I am in arguably the greatest American city, and of course the "bluest" of cities (and we all know what a bunch of Marxists they are at NPR), and my public radio station blows. There is some good original programming like On the Media and the Brian Lehrer show, but the national programming is limited and during those periods I'm most interested in listening to news programming – weekends and nights – the programming consists of a bland mix of thematically neutral classical and "American songbook" programs that always manage to alternately bore and annoy and include way too much Frank Sinatra. And, most unforgivable of sins, my prime public radio listening time, the sleep-in hours on Sunday morning, is violated by the execrable “Sound and Spirit.” To top it off, it’s recently been pledge-drive time, and I have never heard such aggressive fundraising from any of the many public radio stations I’ve supported. Usually the idea is to hold the popular shows hostage by begging on-air in between portions of the programming. But during the WNYC membership-drive, I frequently forget what "show" was even on, because I’ve heard nothing but guilt-tripping fundnagging for the last half-hour. Maybe that’s what it takes to get to hardened New Yorkers, but in only a short while of regular listening, I’ve grown to hate my local station enough to just turn it off.

9) Everybody, but everybody walks around wired either to an iPod or a cell phone. The iPod people I like, because the music is rarely loud (although I am interested to note that it turns out that it is, in fact, possible to listen to extremely uncool music on an iPod… I figured there’d be a block or something…”iMullet,” etc) and sometimes you get people who just can’t help themselves and bust a subtle move right there on the subway, and that’s kind of cute. I recently tried my iPod out on the subway for the first time, with mixed feelings. I’ve long had this attitude that I wasn’t so into portable music because I wanted to listen to the music of real everyday world sounds, blah blah zencakes, etc. But now I can totally see the appeal of walking around with your own little soundtrack and anyway, Stereolab sounds better than most of the subway musicians. Plus, those white earphones always give someone a certain allure: what cool-ass music is that cool-ass person listening to on their cool-ass media player? I don’t know, but I could use some allure, I think, so I’ll be wearing the white earphones at the very least from now on even if the jack is only plugged into my shirt pocket. The cell phone people, on the other hand, are pretty obnoxious because the cognitive tension generated by trying to distinguish between annoying people talking on cell phones and crazy people talking to themselves is appreciable; cues from someone’s appearance are less helpful than you’d think (see #1).

10) Everybody sleeps in. At first I thought it was just my lab – the PI commutes in from somewhere on Long Island, and waits until 10 or so to leave in order to avoid traffic. Naturally, the people who work for him will tend to conform to his schedule. But after a few rides in on the L at 10:00 AM myself, I had to wonder – why are there so many people on the train mid-morning? Nobody works? Or everybody comes in late… Yeah, well, everybody comes in late. It dawned on me when I found I couldn’t use those precious hours between 9-11 in the morning, when I can reasonably be up without anyone expecting me at work, to get a haircut. Because none of the salons open before 11. As it turns out, a lot of businesses don’t open before 10. City that never sleeps, I guess.

11) Everybody in Manhattan is moving to Williamsburg, apparently. There was an alarming article in the real estate section of the Times last weekend that had a half-page map showing all the new and planned construction in the neighborhood. I couldn’t swear to it, but I remember the little red dots on the map which depicted developments as being shaped like little cartoon bomb-flashes; maybe they even said “POW!” Everybody here who I’ve mentioned it too gets really irritable about it, and I think there’s a widespread feeling of dread as everyone gets ready for a yuppie invasion and braces for the inevitable rent hikes. I got out of San Francisco just before the internet bubble crapped up everything, but perhaps my timing wasn’t as good in this case.

12) Everybody was right: it costs a fortune to live here.