thoughts on new york

i've been in new york for the past few days, and i have a few thoughts and observations that are probably more self-revealing than relevant to the actual city. but here we go:

- everything is expensive, especially apartments. my friend is living in a room about the size of a folded out futon. i know it's the size of a futon because when we folded out his futon, there was literally no space left for anything.

- people need to make money because everything is expensive. i wonder how christians live in the city, since you pretty much have to worship money in order to live here. seriously, if your priorities are not on your job and making money, i can't imagine surviving here for very long.

- i am totally a tourist. taking the subway is such an experience for me. and everywhere i go, i need to know what part of town i'm in and what kind of people hang out there and such. i guess this is an observation about myself, and not the city. oh well.

- a more specific observation - when i was taking the bus here from philly, i saw a bunch of pidgins eating some stuff on the sidewalk. and i looked closer, and next to the mob was a dead pidgin, with its guts everywhere. but his fellow pidgins were too busy surviving to care. and i thought - that is totally what new york is like!! obviously the city still scares me.

- getting around in the northeast is so simple. trains, planes and automobiles. except, not planes, and buses instead of automobiles.

- one out of every thousand or so people is crazy, and you probably see about 5000 people a day. all of these numbers are made up.

- one out of every ten tourists talks about the above "fact". i know this because a couple sat down across from me and my friend at a diner and had the same exact conversation about the crazies in new york, with the same exact statistics.

- the chances of seeing someone you know if you're walking around is 100%, especially people you haven't talked to in a million years.

- this list is getting really boring and stupid.

i totally understand why new york is such a lonely place. there are so many people here, to the point where everybody is nobody. people live their own lives, which here is so demanding already. but given all this, new york is still a million times better than anywhere in the south. what little 5 is in atlanta is blocks of hipster living in new york. in fact, every little spot in atlanta doesn't compare to their counterparts in new york.

but then again, nobody in atlanta pays 900 bucks for a closet.