Memoirs of a Gen Y Drifter

Pushy street vendors. Oblivious tourists. A smorgasbord of stimuli.

Although I’d heard so much about the so-called “perfect metropolis”, being a mess of stutters and socially awkward limbs, I thought I’d be overwhelmed by the unending pandemonium instead. One winter morning dawdling through Central Park, however, I found I didn’t actually mind the distant whir of car horns and brouhaha, and ended up falling in love with the city and all its rough edges. The whole peace and quiet thing was overrated anyway.

Hostels scarce and too poor to stay at a hotel for a month, I wound up renting a small (read: tiny!) apartment uptown and began frequenting the 24 hour diner nearby that became my late-night go-to and eventual source of all my gym-related woes. Somewhere in between the trips from the apartment to my blue cheese hamburger, I befriended all my neighbours, and despite what everyone said about New Yorkers (as long as you didn’t walk on the wrong side of the footpath, or walk too slow, or bump elbows with anybody…), the satisfaction was almost spiritual.

I’d started to feel—even for just a little bit—like I belonged somewhere in all the chaos. It was that tether that brought me to appreciate the New York City inhabitants, often the weird and wonderful (not mutually exclusive), as the culprits responsible for the vibrancy of this eclectic city. The lady across the hall and her dog with the mohawk was no exception.

It was a little intimidating being in a city full of people that were unapologetically unafraid to be themselves, but then watching them flip the figurative bird just by living true to the very essence of their being day-to-day was a jarring wake up call as to why New York City is the hodgepodge icon that it is.

I quickly learnt not to cynically roll my eyes at the woman roaming the city clad in all green from hair to toe, and there was a lesson to be learnt in just going up and dancing with the drag queen wearing the chandelier on her head. I wouldn’t have soaked up that kind of spirit just by marvelling at the rowdy college bros and attractive after-work crowd from afar on $1 beer Monday at the Stumble Inn.

It wasn’t the Statue of Liberty or the Flatiron Building or the glitz or the glam or the insomniacs or the stockbrokers; it was the power of conversation, the peculiar and the slightly offbeat, in a city that facilitates your wildest, unabashedly bizarre dreams. In New York City, you can be the guy who wears their cake and eat it too.