New York: city of the thankfully weird

I was walking back from the grocery store, carrying two bags. I turned off Broadway and realized half a block later that I was singing to myself. It was a song that had been playing on the radio in the store. Or a song that had been playing on Pandora, back at my apartment. Or maybe it was a song I’d heard somewhere else without really noticing. The chorus jumped up, almost an octave, and it required a little passion to sing it effectively. A woman walked by, huddled into her coat. She didn’t even glance at me. A man walked by with two dogs. Neither he nor the dogs found anything about me noteworthy.

A woman wearing a leopard print hat walked by and caught my attention. It was really tall. But it wasn’t even close to the most creative fashion choice I’d seen that day. I live in New York City. The city where nothing is surprising anymore.

The other day, in Central Park, I walked by two men dressed in sparkling silver bodysuits with long, luxurious pink wigs. On matching silver bicycles with pink tasseled handlebars. Whatever. They didn’t even make it into the conversation I was having with a friend on my cellphone.

Yeah, it’s true. You can feel the sharp divide between the Upper East Side and the not-quite-Upper-East-Side below it. The people are suddenly whiter. The coffee shops feel comfortable charging three times more than Starbucks (which is already bad enough). The window displays are elegantly spare, sometimes featuring a single shoe and one, lonely purse. You can feel yourself enter a different dimension when you get off the 2 train in Harlem, and the white guy in the suit looks abruptly conspicuous and silly. But plenty of young, pale-skinned women have moved into Harlem on their own. And plenty of people who aren’t white and from Connecticut have infiltrated the UES. And even though the divisions still exist in an obvious way, it doesn’t take very long to get from 85^th and Park to Malcolm X Boulevard. We’re all pretty close to each other.

(Tasteful. Source)

Christmas music blasts out of the Radio Shack, but there’s a hannukiah (Chanukah menorah) in the window, too. People are always wearing whatever they want.

And as someone who has been weird her whole life, I appreciate the weirdness of this city. “Weird”, after all, usually just means “different.” And “diverse” is just “a lot of weirdness.”

Most of the people in New York City have gone or are going to school. They aren’t weird in the way that I have always been. But they seem to understand instinctively that whatever it is that sets me apart, it’s just not that big of a deal.

When I came here, I told people that I’d been homeschooled. They said, “Oh, cool,” and the conversation moved on. I kept waiting for more. I kept waiting to explain that I was actually pretty social. That I didn’t seem to be too traumatized. That I hadn’t really considered therapy. But they weren’t interested. They were looking at the woman with the leopard print hat. And then they were forgetting about her, too, a moment later.

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Wild Fun: Follow a river. As far as you can. I’ve always wanted to do this.