Being here

When I took a CD out from the library for the first time today, it turned out that Acts I & II of La Bohème had been replaced with Lenny Kravitz’s Greatest Hits. It was probably inadvertent, but I like to think that some rabid Lenny Kravitz fan was nefariously replacing CDs in the back of the library just to shock and appall all the harmless classical music listeners out there. All over Brooklyn, night after night, some unsuspecting music nerd goes to listen to Puccini or Bartok and gets a dose of reasonably catchy if less than spectacular pop-rock. Bewildering conspiracies are the best.

And now, although it’s not much of a segue, the ways in which living in a city differs from not:

1) There’s a lot more stuff. Buildings, activities, people, forms of transportation: these are all available in excess, which is both part of the fun and a little disorienting to someone not used to it.
2) On that topic: public transportation, namely, subways. Both wonderful and utterly frustrating, they encapsulate my encounter with the city as a whole on a daily basis. The fundamental idea of a subway appeals to me for some reason: I go underground in Brooklyn and poof! suddenly I’m in Manhattan, a form of magic accessible to everyone. I feel pride and mastery when I do something right, and feel equally disheartened when I don’t, or when service is changed and the F turns out to only go where I need it to if the number of letters in the name of the stop is a multiple of 4, which, it turns out, is not often.
3) Your home has its own personality. Other places do too, but less aggressively, and learning the rhythm of life here seems more like an act of assimilation than imposition.
4) Grocery-shopping and errand-running are much, much easier.
5) The sheer number of people has two primary effects, which are not necessarily incompatible: isolation and connection. Oddly, I find knowing that there are so many people here to be isolating, while I find seeing them to be kind of comforting. There is no obvious connection between me and the strangers I pass on the sidewalk, but I feel a camaraderie with them lacking when I contemplate the city from my apartment.
6) Relaxing is harder. For me, at least.

All of this adds up to something and at the same time it doesn’t, because for me part of the experience of living here is a variety and breadth that are too wide-ranging and heterogeneous to be summed and placed into neat conclusions. It’s an experience and a process that takes place on multiple levels, and reinforces the notion that location matters a great deal. It’s a place brimming with possibilities and pitfalls, which is just as it should be. It feels like a place to be young in, to make mistakes and successes and discoveries in. I have a hard time imagining growing old here without having started here. But that’s probably because I’m still young.

And now, for your listening pleasure, some Lenny Kravitz and some La Boheme.