The Fiction and Reality of Central Meeting Places

As some of you might be aware, I am a rather big fan of the television show How I Met Your Mother. I see them at McClaren’s week in and week out and feel a surge of slight envy that they have their little group and their little hang and that they—gasp—actually meet people at this place. It turns out that McClaren’s is actually based on place in New York called McGee’s. It looks basically like McClaren’s and today I felt compelled to seek it out.

Like any good internet stalker, I took my first steps online to learn more about McGee’s. I found this nice little piece about it: “McGee's is a lively Irish Pub with a strong emphasis on great food and drinks as well as friendly service. Our main bar area boasts big screens, surround sound and a huge selection of draft and bottled beers. This pub offers a lot of booths comfortable for dining and sports viewing. McGee's serves hamburgers, salads, potato skins, fried calamari and a variety of other appetizers for guests to enjoy.” Sounds yummy, I thought to myself. So now McGee’s/McClaren’s is a good time, a good place to meet people and it has good food! Forgive me if the jealousy was more than a little slight at this point.

Then I stopped and thought about it. I often think wistfully back to my Northampton days as some kind of heyday that I can never replicate. There was a bit of a tradition (I say it this way because we went with only slight regularity but often enough that it could be called a tradition) for me and my three friends to go out to a place called FitzWilly’s. It too could be characterized as a lively Irish pub with strong emphasis on great food and drinks. It too has a lot of comfortable booths as well as a bar (and even more bar next door at the Toasted Owl if the FitzWilly bar was just too small for you). And it too has some great potato skins that we almost always ordered.

And that’s about when I had a rather pleasant realization. All that time I was watching How I Met Your Mother (or Friends or Seinfeld or really any show with a central meeting place) and feeling those twinges of envy, I was basically living the dream. I had my three friends and we went out to FitzWilly’s and drank and ate burgers and potato skins and laughed and generally had a good time. So while this may be bittersweet, I guess it reinforces those old lessons about being grateful for the present and being careful what you wish for. Who knows? You may have already had it.

Puffers in the City

I feel like every new Life phase I enter, there is incrementally more smoking. Given logic and positivity, you would think that this would not be the case. Considering the amount of advertising now done against smoking and what we now know about the health risks, you would think that this would not be the case. And yet, it is.

When I started at Smith in 2004, I was nearly blown away (no pun intended) by the amount of puffers around campus. They seemed to be everywhere as I pointedly hacked my lungs out in front of them whenever I could. I assumed that all this sudden smoking was because everyone was basically over 18 now and could thus legally obtain cigarettes. This compared with a high school full of underage smokers where smoking was the sneaky, semi-cool thing you did back behind the football field just over the school’s property line to thumb your nose at the school’s dictatorial principal. Perhaps in college, people were just expressing their newly-found right to buy cigarettes and that accounted for the difference.

Anyway, I got used to it. I chilled out, stopped my pointed coughing and just chose to hold my breath whenever I passed a smoker. I was damned if I was going to get lung cancer because that idiot couldn’t read a Surgeon General’s warning!

And then I came to New York. If I thought Smith was bad, New York was like living in a chimney. They were even more everywhere! And I couldn’t hold my breath that consistently as I walked around the city. (For any number of other reasons, that kind of oxygen deprivation probably wouldn’t do wonders for my health any more than breathing in their smoke would.) The subway was my only refuge from these people who just can’t seem to obey common laws of courtesy by keeping their addiction to themselves in some private corner. I honestly get a trifle offended by their insistence on polluting my air as well as their lungs. It doesn’t seem fair that my health should suffer from their habit.

I had a last straw moment today in the big city in terms of smoking. We had a protest at work this fine autumnal day (I work for a historic preservation organization so it’s okay and we’re not a bunch of crazies, I promise) and, of course, it was outdoors. It was there on the curb that my suspicions about my boss were realized. In addition to being a fruit juice-loving, passionately cause-oriented, gay, hat-wearing thirtysomething, my boss is also a smoker. And he just stood there on the curb talking to me about the building we were trying to save, smoking away, blowing smoke up above our heads. With each puff my respect for him diminished. How could he do this? Why would he do this? Does he really have a death-wish?

Just to cut to the chase, it didn’t resolve in me actually doing anything about it other than writing this. Because even if a smoker can’t respect my space, my lungs and my preferences, the least I can do is respect their right to make those decisions. I can be the better person in this situation by not exploding about why in God’s name they would chose to do this to themselves. So, just like I didn’t explode at my other smoking co-worker, I didn’t say anything today. I still feel imposed upon and little disrespected in terms of personal space, but there isn’t anything to say. They know the issues and they clearly can’t stop. Perhaps the number of people smoking has gone down and that I just keep entering these bigger and bigger sample areas so it just feels like there are more smokers. At least that’s what I like to think. And hope.

New Yorkers: Some Snapshots

I leave the alcove studio apartment I share with my mother at or very close to 8:20 a.m. most mornings. I take the elevator down from the twelfth floor to the shiny lobby and there encounter Melanie, the girl at the desk. She is kind of notoriously surly until you somehow pass some mental-Melanie test and you're golden. So the first three months I lived there, I was greeted every morning with a glare and silence. Now, I say "Good morning!" and she replies with a perky, "Have a nice day!" "You, too," I call back as I'm halfway out the door. It's a very strange transformation, but not at all unwelcome. In a city that is filled with unfriendliness, I would much prefer such a morning to a surly glare.

I only have to go around the corner to get the subway at East 96th Street. There, if you go before 9 a.m., there is a hunched Asian man of indeterminate years (he could quite honestly be anywhere in between fifty and seventy) handing out AM NY. He has one of this quintessentially Asian mustaches, the ones that are short above the lip and then hang limply down around the mouth, and he rarely smiles. He calls out, "Am NY! Am NY!" and attempts to foist a copy of the paper on every single person getting off the bus, going down into the subway or coming up out of the subway. The first few weeks I lived here, he offered one to me every day and every day I would shake my head with a small smile and a definite hand gesture and say, "No thank you." This daily ritual has been enough to win me over as his friend. Now, he knows me in a pleasant way that no one else in this big city has yet to rival. He sees me and grins but doesn't hand me a paper. I say "Good morning!" and he nods back with that smile on his face. The limp ends of his mustache sway a little at the unexpected smile.

Nothing happens on the train, as usual. I've heard and read so much that the train is a great place to meet people because you're stuck with roughly the same commuters five days a week on the platform and then in a tiny subway car. But the only people I ever recognize are this strangely heterosexual-looking gay couple whose only sign of their own gayness is a pair of matching, glittering rhinestone charm bracelets that they wear like wedding bands. They commute together every day down to Union Square. They get off there, like me, but I have no idea where they go. That’s kind of the thing about New York. You see people every day but don’t learn anything new. I like to think they walk each other to work, kiss circumspectly and then meet up for the commute home before ordering various kinds of exotic take-out every night because they both hate to cook.

As I trudge to and from work every day., there are these two utterly unclean old men who hang out on the stoop of a brownstone across from Webster Hall. I have no idea if they live there or are homeless, but they hang out there and sometimes one of them sings. As I was walking to work one day, I made eye contact with the African-American one and smiled (something no one in New York does, by the way). He eagerly leaned forward and grinned, "Hello!" he chirped. "Good morning," I replied civilly and continued on. These are the kind of people I meet on this street. Not international superstars. Not even people my own age. Just dirty old men.

This snapshot seems to be making an argument opposite to my usual point about New York City, that the people here are unfriendly and don't care if you live or die as long as you get out of their way. But the people in this little piece are the exception. I've been shoved by some overzealous, hurried city-person more times than I can count and the few times I've attempted to form a human bond with another pedestrian by making eye contact and saying "Hello," I've been ignored. I didn't even get past the eye contact. The people here are like this dog my high school French teacher used to impersonate: their eyes are anywhere but locked with yours. They'd rather look at a pile of garbage ("Oh how interesting!" you can almost hear them forcing themselves to say in their heads) than make eye contact let alone say "Hello." It can wear you down and I think remembering the few times someone did bother to greet you or shared a smile with you can help with the otherwise self-absorbed culture of this place.

Job Title: Gramma?

Well, I didn't really think being a mother could be this official and I must say that I find it quite amusing that it can. Here's to moms who are not just mothers, but are officially deemed so by the phone book!

The Debate between the Idiot and the Articulate Person...Sound Familiar?

There is a fine line between elitist and superior. Some would say that neither are good traits, especially shown off during a town hall debate, but I would say that only the latter is truly fatal. John McCain has shown a remarkably smug superiority throughout this debate which I find utterly unappealing and even off-putting. From the very second question (when he rather patronizingly commented to a young black man that "I betcha never even heard of Freddie and Fannie before"), I have never felt more spoken down to. Yes I want an intelligent leader, but I don't want one who thinks he is so godlike that he assumes all us commoners can't possibly know everything that he does.

McCain had a number of unbelievably patronizing moments in this debate, but I think it is really his policy and issue broad strokes and attempts at a folksy Sarah Palin rhetoric that will really do him in. He over-generalized complex issues to the point that he did not seem to have a firm grasp of them. It just ended up making him seem like some potty old man who can't understand complex issues let alone explain them in answer to a question. Obviously, I'm no expert, but I do have half a brain (which allows me to have heard of Frannie and Freddie and, yes, even the internet itself which Mr. McCain openly disavows) and I think this debate did John McCain absolutely no good. Once again, the republican didn't implode, but he (in this case) certainly didn't gain any ground either.

Meanwhile, I think Obama successfully sounded calm and informed rather than superior. He may have laid McCain's faults on a little bit thick and played a little fast and loose with his condemnations of his opponent's record, especially towards the end of the debate, but on the whole he was persuasive and intelligent.

A Stolen Font and a Stolen Voice

A small and large frustration occurred today in my co-worker's calm usurpation of my font. This sounds rather petty, but I don't suppose one can truly appreciate the individuality or prettiness of a font well-chosen until one has taken a printing class, as I had the joy of doing. The class promised to make us view the world in a different way and, unlike so many college classes who say they'll change who you are, this class truly delivered. I do see things differently. It's like an initiation into this special group of people who notice serifs and the differences between the slant of an "e." Anyway, I now take fonts extremely seriously and thought very carefully before choosing one for my work e-mail. I chose Georgia, a relatively new typeface designed for clarity on the computer screen while maintaining the lovely look of something from an earlier age. I really love Georgia and, to my delight, received a few compliments on my font choice from recipients of my work e-mails. There were others in the little font society and I got to communicate with them! They recognized the importance of the font and the choice. "It's like a different voice," one commented. Exactly as I felt.

One of the people to compliment my font choice was my co-worker, E. She is a genuinely nice person who notices the little things and never seems to have a negative or frazzled outlook (unless anyone brings up Sarah Palin, of course, but that sort of thing can be excused). Whereas S manages to up the stress level with her involvement in anything, E brings it all down a notch to calmness and is generally a pleasant person. Thus, I was quite pleased when she complimented the font. She rose in my estimation by showing off, most basically, her ability to notice the tiny details of a font and, more importantly, her similar taste to mine in terms of a nice font. "It's so pretty I kind of want to use it as my own!" she joked and we all laughed.

Fast forward a week to today when I received a short, ordinary e-mail from her. It was just asking me to enter some information in the database in the most friendly, polite terms as she always did. But it was all in Georgia. It was jarring. I was momentarily confused. It was like hearing your own voice on a recording somewhere unexpected or suddenly coming around a corner to face a mirror, and yourself. It took me a moment to realize what had happened: font theft! E-mail identity theft! Theft of voice! I was, needless to say, peeved.

But how to explain this to someone who is genuinely and simply practicing the oldest form of flattery in the book: imitation? She really did just think it was very nice and wanted something equally nice. How can one argue against that? The answer is that you can't and I just have to let it go, but it still rankles a little.