I am not a particularly cool person. I play video games, wear comic book t-shirts and just last weekend I spent two hours watching a movie called, "Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter." While I am not particularly well-dressed, well-groomed and well-bred, I am occasionally reminded that living in this city can make you significantly cooler than the sum of your parts.
Case in point, on a grey morning as you walk to work, you can step off a sidewalk and walk through a blast of steam coming up from the subway. It twists around you and as you step out of that small cloud of white, surrounded by people walking perpendicular to you, that invisible movie camera zooms in towards you, time and fog slow down and you feel like you are in a John Woo film, about to face a million bad guys as an undercover cop.
Another example, you walk across Washington Square Park. The sun is shining and as you walk towards the camera, you can feel a flock of pidgeons behind you take flight into a blue sky dotted with high clouds. You walk forward and the camera circles around behind you. It sees you as you walk towards a beautiful woman with curly hair and you walk up to her and take her in your arms and give her a passionate kiss for the whole park to see... Is it a scene from the latest romantic comedy or is it daily life in the city?
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I am a fairly cool guy. I have an interesting career, I occasionally wear frappachino glasses and I can relate well to many different types of people. While I have an attractive wife, friends from all walks of life and I write a blog, I am occasasionally reminded that living in the city can make you significantly lamer than the sum of your parts.
Case in point: You are walking up the stairs from the subway. It is a gray rainy morning. You are wearing a pretty cool black jacket, nice slacks and a matching belt and shoes. As you take the last step up, a huge gust of wind blows up. You see four people walking towards you and the gust of wind pops each of their umbrellas out like kids popping the tops off of dandelions. The gust of wind carries a wall of water that drenches your pants through. By the time you get to the office, you look like you have walked through a typhoon, with leaves stuck in your hair, pants two shades darker from the water and socks that won't dry out until lunch. The camera zooms in on the pathetic temp worker arriving for another miserable day of work.
Another example, over the course of your first two weeks, you receive three parking violations for some damned thing or another and you curse your luck as you enter an intersection on a yellow light and there is a flash of light behind you... you just scored ticket number four. You are sitting on the subway, enthralled in your book and as you get up to leave, you realize that the person who you thought was coughing a little bit was an ancient woman with a cane and four bags of groceries who just stood for the last four stops because you didn't get up and give up your seat (as you normally would). The camera follows you out of the subway door, only to turn around and show the disgusted faces of your fellow commuters. You try to walk out with some sense of pride but you can't help feeling like a total jackass.
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