Maestro Meets the Big Apple

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While it's technically true that I've been to New York before, it was under conditions that were less than ideal. I had just returned from England where my girlfriend had broken up with me. I missed my connecting flight in Newark, and figured I should go to see the Big Apple. But after taking the train into Penn Station, I managed only a couple of blocks before falling into a lonely drink across the street from Madison Square Garden. It was an uneventful night, and for all intents and purposes I had seen nothing of New York.

So all technicalities aside, I was truly visiting New York for the first time. My roommate Kasey was meeting some of her artist friends from Florida there and was kind enough to extend the invitation to me. So this visit had a distinctly artsy flavour to it. There were a good number of art openings going on, and to my great surprise this is a great way to find free alcohol. But more than that, there are some fantastic, and curious exhibitions of really cool stuff.

We arrived on Friday night and I bailed on Kasey and her friend Fran while they were playing catch-up. It's actually really boring to be an outsider looking in on the first few hours of conversation between old friends. There's something to be said for the curiosity of the moment though. You are in the group but not of it. You understand the words and the stories being told, but you are lacking the context that guides their narrative. An intrusion upon friends such as this is akin to being a foreigner without a grasp of the language. As my curiosity waned, I thought it best to leave them to catch up and I went to check out the Empire State Building. It was cool to say I'd gone up, and in it's day, it must have been spectacularly high, but as with all great and mighty things, it has been eclipsed by the wonders of human ego and ingenuity to the point that it failed to wow me. Perhaps it was 31 years of expectation that couldn't been met but with a little disappointment.

I had a very good time in New York, and enjoyed most the chance to wander around a people watch. New York is a strange place in that it is filled with beautiful people. It's not unique in that, as I've mentioned it on numerous occasions. But where it does stand out is that New York is an inordinately young place. The young and beautiful people tend to peal away from the core as they get older, their ideas of what life should be like begin to change, what to raise families and have yards and such that New York cannot provide.

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