I could write this notebook about everything I learned at the College Media Advisers Conference I am riding home from (gold star to anyone who knows the difference between a drophead and a subhead), but in 20—OK, two—years even I won’t be able to answer that question. What I won’t forget is how the noise and flashing lights of Times Square were reduced to an abstract lightshow on our hotel shades at 3 am. I will remember riding the subway at rush hour and getting told by a cab driver to “suck it up and walk.”
The city can be a sensory overload, but it can also be a reminder of our common humanity. At home, the stock market is only an impersonal arrow, either red or green, but seeing Wall Street on a weekday reminds me that the stock market is a technosocial system, as much an invention of humanity as the skyscrapers it is housed in. I did not realize how close the U.N.’s building is to Ground Zero, and what a juxtaposition. The United Nations symbolizes the potential for “world peace,” while the absence of two buildings I never even saw is a stark reminder of the people in the world who wish to jeopardize that peace.
The point is that it is not the glitter of store fronts or the delicious food that amazes me about the city (but please don’t take that away); it is the people. At any given time there are millions of people in New York City. Many are beggars and many are millionaires. Some are leads on Broadway and some are stand-up comics in a nondescript basement. This talent, this hardship—any of it—can be found elsewhere in the world, but the city is unique in how close and mixed together everything is.
I did not know the people I passed on the crowded sidewalks—except for my neighbor from back home in Texas whom I literally ran into. Weird. I will never know their stories, but the city reminded me how connected we all are.
So yes, I will try to apply all the headline-creating tips to my work at The Poly, but the experience of being in New York City is what I will remember. Even the parts I wouldn’t mind forgetting, like the rat that got a little too familiar.
