Journal Entry for February 25, 2022

 

February 25, 2022

Here I am again, sitting, trying to write anything to get the words flowing.  So far, so good, although I could find myself stopped anytime.

My birthday was three days ago.  I didn’t get any presents or phone calls or anything, but I got loads of good wishes on Facebook, which means something.  My actual celebration will take part on Sunday late afternoon.  I will go out to eat with Andrey and Joan.  Andrey couldn’t make it on an earlier day because he and his wife went out of town on a well-deserved mini vacation for a few days this week.  I hope they had a good time and good weather.

Speaking of weather, we have miserable weather today, with snow and sleet.  I put in an Instacart order for some groceries and felt guilty about bringing my “shopper” out on a day like this.  I gave her an extra $10 in cash to add to her tip.  I also gave her a good rating and compliments and tried to make her look good to the Instacart people.  A shopper has to do something pretty wrong to get me to give less than five stars because I don’t want to make trouble for anyone on their job.  I guess I’m an old softy at heart, or I feel responsible for the world.  I’ll have to figure that one out.

I feel responsible for the world, and I think that is my old-fashioned Catholic school upbringing.  Catholic guilt has more than one facet to it, and I think this is one of them.  In addition to being guilty of sin and, therefore, guilty of causing Jesus to be crucified, we are responsible for the world.  It’s a lot to put on a person’s shoulders.

I have now gone over 300 words.  Three hundred words is not a magic sum, but I seem to have made it into a self-imposed limit because of the Corlear Gardens Newsletter, for which I try to write something every month.  To avoid making the newsletter too long, I limit my contributions to 300 words.  Besides that, I’m not sure the attention span of my building’s readers could stand more than 300 words, along with all the other stuff that goes into the newsletter.  I have no way of knowing how well or not well the newsletter is being received by the people of the building.  Nobody tells me.  I have to hear second-hand from Valerie or Jimmy, the people who work with me on the newsletter, when anyone says anything to them about it, which isn’t often.  Maybe I should conduct a survey and offer a prize, or something.  Nobody wants my George Forman grill when I offer to give it away, but perhaps if I make it an award, it will seem more attractive!

Again, I am not writing a masterpiece here.  I leave that to when I write something that I want to bother editing.

Until tomorrow.

 

You Know It's Summer in New York City When ...

This piece, and more of my humor, can be found at www.humoroutcasts.com.

New York's Favorite Noise Polluter

Griping about the weather is one of the great New York City pastimes.  It’s right up there with jaywalking, making fun of tourists and trying to walk faster than anyone else who is using the same sidewalk.  It’s not that we’re wimps … well, okay, we are wimps.  This is because most of us don’t drive cars, which means that we can’t just hop from the kitchen to the garage and into an automobile.  We have to be out in whatever Earth’s atmosphere is throwing at us, unless we want to stay holed up at home.

New York City’s summers are legendary.  Because the temperature rarely gets above the mid-90s, those of you who live in places where summer means 100 degrees in the shade are probably asking, “What’s the big deal?”  I can answer this in one word:

Humidity.

New Yorkers spend a typical summer day awash in water:  once or twice in the shower at home and every time they step outside.  Humidity also has the ability to make 90 degrees feel like 100, at the same time it is pulling every drop of moisture from your body and soaking your clothes in sweat.

That said, here is how you know it’s summer here:

1.  You can feel the heat from the pavement through your shoes.  New Yorkers know better than to wear flip-flops on the street in July.  Those things could melt and take your feet with them.

2.  Underground subway stops become makeshift Turkish baths, especially the Times Square stop on the west side IRT line.  The only difference between it and a real Turkish bath is that the people on the subway platform have their clothes on.

3.  You avoid getting on an almost empty subway car with plenty of available seats because you know the reason it is almost empty is that the air-conditioning isn’t working in there.

4.  Your hair, which looked perfect when you left your apartment, becomes limp and droopy after five minutes outside.

5.  The Mr. Softee Ice Cream Truck Song, a/k/a The World’s Most Maddening Earworm, gets more play on the street than your favorite song gets on your iPod.

6.  It doesn’t really cool off at night, unless there’s a thunderstorm or something, and even then it doesn’t cool off very much.  You know you shouldn’t be running your air conditioning in a thunderstorm, but you are willing to risk death to be comfortable.

I love summer, but, as a true New Yorker, I have to complain about it.  It wouldn’t be right to go against tradition.

Life in New York City

New York has a bad reputation, much of it undeserved.  In movies, television and newspapers New York is always dirty, crime-filled, blight-ridden and dangerous.  (“There are 8 million stories in The Naked City … .”?  Talk about lousy public relations!)  Actually, it’s a nice place to live, if you don’t mind the expense.  We pay for the privilege of living here – a lot.  But, in spite of what you see on Law and Order, we don’t stumble over gruesome murder victims every time we step outside.  Most of us never see a murder victim even once in our entire lives.  Really.  It’s true.

I have lived here for over thirty years.  Most of that time I lived in Brooklyn.  For the last several years The Bronx has been my home.  I only lived in Manhattan for a couple of months, but I’ve been working there for over 30 years, not to mention all the performances I have sung and attended there and all the friends I have who live there.  I know Manhattan better than I know either Brooklyn or The Bronx, which is very New Yorker of me.

The Weather

New Yorkers will get through a hurricane, a Nor’easter or a giant blizzard with great courage and fortitude.  High winds?  Flooding?  A week of blackouts?  Fuhgeddaboudit!  On the other hand, a little bit of rain or slush turns us into a bunch of grumbling sissies.

The reason is that most New Yorkers don’t have cars.  A car is a lot of trouble here, and we have good public transportation almost everywhere, except on Staten Island.* People in other parts of this country can step out of their houses on a crummy day and right into the car.  Most New Yorkers step outside into the weather and walk in it.  Sometimes we have to stand in it.  The curbs soon become littered with broken umbrellas that have been tossed aside and left to die alone and abandoned.  Very few of today’s umbrellas can survive the combination of bad weather and the anger of a New Yorker caught in the rain, especially if there is a high wind at the same time.  In that case, all bets are off and it’s every man for himself, women and children included.

It’s a good thing that it doesn’t snow as often here as it does Upstate or in New England.  Snow in New York City is pretty for about five minutes before it turns into Super Slush.  If there is any way to get inside your boots, Super Slush will find it.  Super Slush congregates in massive piles on street corners, turning getting across the street into a Herculean task.  Attempting a broad jump over the mess is likely to land you smack in it, surrounded by strangers, some of whom will want to kill you because you splattered dirty slush on them and the rest of whom might help you up after they get through laughing like hyenas or catching you on video.

The irony is that this city is in a protected little pocket and, aside from our legendary hot, humid summers, our normal weather is pretty mild, considering.  New Jersey, Upstate New York, Long Island and New England get hit with crazy weather a lot more than we do.  We complain anyway, because that’s what we do.

* Staten Island is like a separate country, which suits Staten Islanders just fine.  They don’t really believe that they are part of New York City, and they show it by making it hard for anyone who doesn’t live there to get there.