It’s late May and my cotton skirts and cream-colored ballet flats are languishing ignored in my closet because the weather is throwing a city-sized hissy fit. So in order to placate the raging beast and her growling posse of grey skies and surly winds, I present a loving laundry list of things that I love about New York, never to be found in guidebooks.

“It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.”
E.B. White

The city has a short term memory for trauma and disappointment. What can start out as a terrible day – spilled coffee on the subway, rain when you’re wearing silk, losing a metrocard – can be irresistibly redeemed by another random act, like the saxophonist playing a song you used to sing when you were young, or your fruit seller throwing in an extra orange, or turning a corner and seeing the sun illuminating an entire line of glass buildings.

“When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.” – Fran Lebowitz

Reach is a subway musical installation at the 34th street N/R/W platforms. By reaching up and interrupting the light beams, you set off an individual noise, and there are 10 of them. Created by Christopher Janney, it’s this woodsy and ringing cacophony of surprisingly welcome noise in one of the smelliest stations in New York. It never fails to perk up my late night returns from Brooklyn.

“And we found other evacuees in the country who sat on their suburban lawns, planning to go back when the children had finished college; and when the rain fell into the leaves of the rock maples they asked: ‘Oh, Charlie, do you think it’s raining in New York?’”
- John Cheever

New Yorkers are, possibly more than any other city in America, here by choice. There are always easier and cheaper places to live. But the biting, scratching will to keep making it in this city gives everyone around you – yes, even those assholes on the morning commute – a certain glow, born from the active and constant effort of living out your dreams.

“This is the town that never sleeps. That’s why we don’t live in Duluth. That plus I don’t know where Duluth is. Lucky me.”
- Woody Allen

Taxis are one of my favourite things about the city. Perhaps to the very wealthy, it’s deliciously mundane to hop into a total stranger’s car and pay him money so that you just don’t have to think or plan or navigate for five to twenty minutes, but for me, it’s one of my top luxuries. Staring out the window from that uniquely lazy position where your head is resting on the pleather seatback, watching your poorer, daily self fighting the crowds or the rain, and knowing that all you have to do is pay and exit gracefully – it’s worth every overpriced penny.

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The 7 train is arguably one of the most enjoyable subway rides in New York. Coming aboveground in Long Island City, you’ve got a view of the majestic midtown towers and the contrasting low-lying industrial grittiness of southern Queens. Ride the 7 all the way out to Flushing one day, on a sunny summer afternoon, and stand in the very last car, looking out at the receding skyline from the back door window. You’ll want to turn around and go right back into the fray.

“New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment, a place where you’re least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.” – Brendan Behan

The delicious close voyeurness of the city is probably its sexiest aspect. When I lived in the West Village for a summer, I saw an entire relationship crumble over the course of three months, in the swank apartment across West 4th. In June, it was all rooftop barbeques and laughing over bottles of wine, dancing across the parqueted floors for Mathias and Jorge (as we so named them). In the middle of July, Jorge started coming home late, lights turning off as he proceeded towards the bedroom, dropping briefcases and romances along the way. In August, there was a fight, curiously starting in the bathroom through frosted glass, a slammed front door and darkened windows for a few days as Mathias obviously went to the shore to collect himself. The apartment went on the market two days before I moved out.

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.”
- E.B. White

I like meeting people in the wrong places at the wrong time. On a Friday night when you’re supposed to be out drinking or dining with friends, like the rest of New York City, I think the people that ended up someplace random are more vulnerable, more open for conversation. The supermarket deli counter is a good one, or a commuter train, or a bookstore, or the dog run at your local park. At the dog run, I finally started talking to the woman with the two-legged dog that I’d seen around the park for ages. She was a psychiatrist that had lived in Westchester her whole life until her husband died, and then she’d moved to the West Village, “to live near all the young people,” she said. I didn’t have the courage to ask what had happened to the sad and devoted dog strapped into a set of hind-leg wheels. I met a woman on the train that told me all about raising her family in New York City, and her son that had wanted to be an actor and was now going to law school, and how she worried that he wasn’t following his dreams. At the deli-counter at Trade Fair, I talked to a cabbie about cheese.

“New York is a city of conversations overheard, of people at the next restaurant table checking your watch, of people reading the stories in your newspaper on the subway train.” – William E. Geist

Stuart and I played fashion police once, for an hour. We sat in a relatively hidden corner of the Trump Plaza at Columbus Circle, just high enough off the sidewalk that people didn’t automatically notice us. And we critiqued, praised, slammed, offered suggestions for about two hundred people that walked by. “What is she thinking with those SOCKS?” and “I like that look for him, it sort of says ‘I hang OUT with gay men but I’m straight’, especially those shoes” and “what is it with STRIPES this season, everyone’s wearing them,” and “their styles don’t match at all, that couple isn’t long for this world”. It was amazing, and the funny thing was, I couldn’t stop doing it to people walking by OR myself, for about a week.

“And New York is the most beautiful city in the world? It is not far from it. No urban night is like the night there. Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the ether. Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.” – Ezra Pound
The best thing about going away for a holiday from New York City, I think, is the feeling of coming back. When you fly in to LaGuardia, and it almost seems like the pilot is doing a sight tour of the East River just for you, or you coast through the airspace above Manhattan at night and the city lights look like gold filligree laid on black velvet and the bridges look like diamond tennis bracelets and you just want to cry because no matter how perfect Brasil or the Caribbean or Paris or even Cinncinati may have been to you, you realize it’s nothing, nothing’s ever, quite like home.

“The city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin: the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.”
- E.B. White

.. I’m just going to have to start eating more pizza now that my iPod tells me where the best slices are in any given neighborhood. Thanks, SliceNY!

photo taken by the kate dot net.
There were eight of us in total, which made for handy little pairings as we walked with a crowd of fifty thousand. Stuart, Conrad, Mike, Shiv, Biscuit, Jason, Kate, and myself. I kept tabs on everyone by sweeping my eyes through the surrounding crush and mentally going, “camo and red tee, okay, Conrad and Mike. Grey and burgundy, Jason and Biscuit. Red and Green, Shiv and Kate.”
We carried about six bananas, eight water bottles, a couple oranges, a bag of Ritz peanut butter cracker sandwiches, three digital cameras, about twelve umbrellas, SPF 60 and eight red wristbands saying “Imagine a World Without AIDS.”
We want to thank you, all of you, who threw a little cash our way or even plugged our walking with a button on your site. We had a wonderful walk, we saw a lot of wonderfully motivated people, and we raised about 750 dollars. We were sweaty and exhausted when we hugged goodbye at Union Square after pizza and burgers, we all went home to showers and naps and video games and movies and sore feet, but we went home happy.
Footsore, I said at the beginning, and hearthappy.
Thanks! And remember, if you forgot to donate, you still can – through June 1. It’s a good thing.