I still have to start packing, but everything that was in my backpack from Central America is in a box right now. Just have to put it back in. Maybe I’ll need different things since this is a one-way ticket and not a definitive two-month backpacking trip, but I figure anything I need I can get there for way cheaper, whether I can work my haggling muscle or not. I know no Thai still and have no guidebook and am not sure where I’m staying, but I’ll be all right. I think. Still have a day. For now, word vomit:
I’ve had five days in New York since I’ve returned from Central America, and it’s been marked by swinging ambivalence. As mentioned previously, I was quite tired when I returned, and that might have affected my mood. It’s always hard to move from one place to another wildly different place – culture shock, I believe they call it – but throw on some fatigue and illness and PMS, and it’s not a brilliant combination.
Upon arriving at Houston International for my connecting flight to Newark, I was already depressed by how cold the people were. I wanted to call my parents to let them know I made it past customs and was back in US territory, but I found it nerve-wrecking to even approach someone to borrow their phone. It wouldn’t have been an unreasonable request, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask the dozens of people sitting around fiddling with their electronic devices if I could borrow one briefly to make a phone call. No one spoke to each other. No one made eye contact with each other. It was like we were all in sterile bubbles, and it was a weird departure from the entire friendly atmosphere of Central America. A weird and depressing one. The stimulus from all the fluorescent lights and CNN on the screen and trolleys carting people around made me stressed, and it had only been 20 minutes.
Getting back to New York wasn’t much better. I didn’t have much time to sleep because I went to see a doctor early the next morning (an allergy doctor – the most helpful sort of doctor in determining what microbe has invaded me), and I spent the remainder of the time cavorting around the city. New York is known for its chilly demeanor, and I forgot how to deal with it. I biked around a bunch, which was faaantastic. I didn’t realize how much I missed my bike until I was on it again. It was a sunny 60 degrees, and god damn it felt good to ride and avoid all the taxi cabs and car doors. I watched the sunset over the Hudson. I had a conversation with a girl wearing a Pitt shirt who recognized the Pitt logo on my Honors College bag, and it was mostly reminiscing about Gene’s Place and talking about how difficult it is to meet people and live in New York. I sat on the dock, and a woman sat three feet away from me and didn’t try to acknowledge my existence. A dude sat six feet away and smoked a bowl by himself. Is this sort of interpersonal distance normal? Desirable? I can’t remember. Then again, it’s not like I made any effort to talk to them either, but I wondered whether this is just a city full of people who want to be left alone or one filled with people yearning for human contact yet not going about it in obvious ways. I don’t know.
It’s not impossible to meet people, but there seems to be an overall opinion shared by New Yorkers I’ve spoken to that it is difficult to make friends here. I have a theory. People move into cities from small towns, farms and bumblefucks galore because their lives in those smaller places weren’t enough. They wanted more than the single main street or life constrained to picket fences. They uprooted their lives and moved into a metropolitan area because there are more people, more buildings, more things to do. More stuff in general to satisfy their greater wants. When you have a city like New York, people from smaller cities – the Clevelanders, say, that have invaded Brooklyn – move there. Even a modestly sized city with all of the amenities of a symphony and gourmet sandwich shops wasn’t enough. They needed more. So what you have is a city filled with people who wanted and needed more. Not just more, but the most. They came to New York seeking the best, and frankly, there is no best. It’s an endless chase for some ideal that can’t be met because it’s just an idea of an ideal, but they’re going to keep going from one boutique shop to the next searching for that more perfect dress. It’s hard-wired in our brains. We’ll find something great, but we’ll always search for something better. I think the approach extends to people as well. If you’re always seeking your next best friend, especially in a city of eight million, how can you ever settle for the people you meet?
Anyway.
Something that became more abundantly clear to me as days went on was how miserable everyone seemed in New York. I heard a saying once: “Live in New York, but don’t live there for too long or else you’ll become too hard.” I remember driving back from Pittsburgh once and being stuck in traffic. Looking at other drivers in other cars, there was a unanimous anger and ingrained type of hopelessness on everyone’s face. Granted, we were stuck in traffic and that can only lead to being pissed off, but it didn’t seem like the kind of traffic-despair I’d seen in Pennsylvania. I may have just been projecting. Maybe not. Walking around and riding my bike the past few days, I still sense that overbearing fatigue from every face I look at.
My 33-year old cousin was talking to me and a younger cousin, one about to graduate high school and pursue those four years in college. He agreed that we should travel now, go backpacking for a month or two, see the world and all of that jazz because once we enter the real world, we won’t ever get an opportunity to do that. We’ll only get five or six days off per year. We’ll get up for work at 6AM and toil in a harshly lit office for a hours on end and then go back exhausted to our apartments or houses with mortgages we’re constantly chipping away at. We won’t have energy to do anything else because then the grind – “the grind” – starts all over again the next day at 6AM, and so on and so forth. So travel now because you won’t get this freedom later.
But why not?
I had some serious apprehension during my trip about not doing things right. Maybe I should have gotten a soul-sucking job for a year or two before I decided to run away to Central America. I was, by and large, the youngest person I met on my travels. Most other folks were 25 and up. I expected to meet more people who had just graduated college and were running away, unsure of what the next step was, taking advantage of their freedom as my cousin told us all to do. Many were full-time travelers who worked six months of the year doing landscaping or working on oil fields or bartending at a seasonal restaurant and then spent the rest of the year hopping from one country to another. Others had quit their jobs after years of soul-sucking and now were free and exploring the world. For me, walking along pristine beaches, catching Pacific sunsets, and taking dips in blue-green lagoons weren’t guiltless experiences because I kept thinking, “I’ve done nothing to deserve this.” I hadn’t worked or felt the crush of a common workweek. I came here after seventeen years of schooling and five months of unemployment. The baseline was pretty high to begin with. I had nothing terrible to compare paradise to. Maybe I should have tried working seriously to understand why traveling really equates to freedom.
There’s a term for people who are constantly on the road: the wandering lost. Most travelers just say they’ve caught the traveling bug. I don’t think I have it, but like other bugs, I’m not sure. I know I get bored easily, and staying on the move helps with that. I’m not in a place in my life where I want to be sitting still. Rather, I’m not ready to settle into anything, be it a place or a job. I’m too curious. The world is so big! There’s so much to see, so many things to try, so many people to meet, so much to learn! I’m sad to say that traveling hasn’t been the answer to cure boredom. People end up being the same (travelers, at least), and moving through places so quickly only taught me superficial lessons about a place. All I have are snapshots and glossy memories. I want to sit somewhere for a while and steep in a place and learn its flavors and nuances. I don’t just want to go from one hostel to another. It’s the same atmosphere tweaked a little to match its different physical location, but it caters to the same people in the end. I’m bored already.
Back to the New Orleans guy from last post. We had dinner, and I mentioned the loneliness that comes with traveling by myself. Later, he mentioned how he felt a sort of lightness, something he felt his entire life. Lightness as in he was ungrounded. He could be surrounded by people and have a stellar night out with pals, really good people these folks, really good times had. Ultimately, he’d still return to his room and his bed and feel a lightness. Not a loneliness, just a feeling of being unsurrounded and a free floating body in some abstract, metaphysical ephemera. I understood that, and I understood it more when I got back to New York. I have no job or financial debt holding me down. My friends are scattered across the globe, trotting down their own paths. My family is still in New York, yes, but there’s that Asian-American distance that I won’t go into here. My goals are vague, if existent. There’s nothing anchoring me anywhere or to anyone, effectively. I feel seriously ungrounded. I think this is what freedom might be. Is it supposed to feel so unsettling?
I’ve been telling myself for years that I was born in New York and I would die in New York. I felt throughout my trip a great nostalgia for New York and built it up in my head as the greatest city in the world, a place unlike anywhere else, the only place where I can ultimately live. Now, upon coming back, I’m not so certain. Yes, it has everything you can ever imagine wanting or needing within city limits, and then some more. It has world-class fill-in-the-blank – food, art, cinema, fashion, etc. It has every niche you can imagine. And that’s why it’s so difficult to live here. Unless I’m making bank, it’s a struggle to live here. People look tired all the time because they are tired all of the time. You have to work unfathomably hard just to have a place to put your hat every day. Even if your salary makes rent payments easy, your salary probably comes at the cost of similarly insane fatigue. It’d be all right if you loved your job, but it doesn’t seem like most people do. It’s like living in New York is a goal in and of itself, which I understand, almost, or at least did at some point but perhaps less so now. Is it really worth it to work so hard and seem so miserable to live in a city where people don’t even talk to each other, maybe because they’re too tired to do so, maybe because they’ve given up, maybe because they just don’t care? It doesn’t seem like the life I want to live. I don’t want to be a part of “the grind.” I don’t want to live in a city of miserable people. At the same time, I don’t want to be a part of the wandering lost. I want to be near MoMA and independent theaters and hallal carts and five-star restaurants. I want my bicycle. I want roots somewhere.
What I’m saying is, yes, I’m one of those people who want it all and I will probably feel the draw of this sleepless city sometime in the future because it happens every time. It is truly an amazing city, and I can never deny that. But, it seems too hard to live in New York without inevitably becoming too hard myself. I’m wavering in my resolve that in the end, I will come back to New York and the states. What happened to my roots? Where am I planted?
In 24 hours, I’ll already be in the air, hurtling towards the Far East in a giant jet. I leave with these apprehensions: will I return? Do I even want to keep moving? What’s going to happen? What am I doing? Where am I going? Where the hell is the ground?
I'm not dead (yet). 