Plaidophile

So, on the subway on the way to work, I was standing in front of a woman who had a duffel bag and a soft pet carrier. Between these two vessels she was juggling perhaps half a dozen young kittens, wiping their eyes of cruft and otherwise consoling them.

She put most of the kittens into the duffel bag, but left it open so they could peek out. One of the kittens, obviously her favorite, she kept in her jacket. She talked to this kitten all the way to Union Square.

Other passengers on the train weren't so happy to have these kittens around, however. They were all glaring at her, as if the kittens were already wreaking havoc, and had escaped and were crapping on their shoes. But they weren't doing anything of the sort; aside from looking around and generally being scared kittens, they caused no trouble.

People bring their small dogs and ferrets onto the subway all the time, and everyone else finds them to be cute. But if someone brings kittens on, they are a pariah.

I don't know where she was going with the kittens, but it was probably important to her that she took them there. She obviously cared about them a lot.

So many people in New York care only about their immediate surroundings, and even then are usually totally oblivious to the people around them. The only thought they give to others is to curse at them for making it slightly less convenient for them to get where they're going, delaying them by seconds at a time. The response is for more signs to go up, telling everyone to step aside, let people out of the train first before you try cramming yourself in, holding the doors open will keep the train from moving which keeps the trains behind it from moving which makes everyone else late, but nobody listens, nobody thinks it applies to them.

One time I was trying to transfer from the L to the R at Union Square during the morning rush hour, as I do nearly every morning, and I was at the back of the train. The torrent of passengers streaming up to the 4/5/6 platform blocked me, and I found myself being pushed from behind by an older lady who was yelling at me to get out of the way so she could get to the R. "Excuse me, please move, please move, I'm trying to get over there."

I turned around, and told her, "Look, I'm trying to get over there too. These people are blocking me as well. We'll just have to wait."

She stared at me, dumbfounded, and ten seconds later returned to shouting, "Excuse me, let me through."

There are too many people here, and common courtesy is spread too thin.

On my commute this morning, the woman sitting next to the lady with the cats, the one glaring every single time the lady said anything to console the kitten in her jacket, got up at Lorimer street, about halfway into my trip. The girl standing next to me was eyeing the seat, as she had gotten on at about the same time as I had. I glanced at her, and at the seat, eyes asking if she wanted to sit there. She smiled, glanced at me to say, "No, you can have it."

I started to turn to sit down, and a stereotypical hipster girl rushed in at full speed, sitting on the seat before I knew what had happened, without so much as acknowledging the presence of anyone else who may have been on their way to it. She didn't afford anyone the common courtesy of seeing whether they were tired and sore and wanted to sit; she grabbed what she could take, without considering anyone else.

If she had asked me for the seat, verbally or not, I would have probably given it to her. But she took it instead.

In New York I frequently see an easy division between people: the polite and the selfish. There are far more polite people, but it is only the selfish who stand out. The man who holds up the line at the deli to complain about how prices are going up. The people who brush past me in a mad rush to get wherever they're going, and catch my briefcase against them, and instead of even turning in the slightest, they just keep on going, pulling me with them. The people who are so intent on shoving their way into the subway car as soon as it arrives that I cannot get out, which would make more room for them anyway.

I used to think that New Mexicans were aggressive, and that New York would afford me a nice, polite anonymity. That the pressures of day-to-day living in an overcrowded metropolis would encourage people to learn to properly queue up, to not cut in lines, to not take up more space than necessary, to help pedestrian traffic flow better, but instead, people get more aggressive, more obnoxious, and do whatever they can to preemptively get as much time/space/service for themselves before someone else can steal it from them. Stealing begets stealing, and situations escalate. New rules are created to stop this from happening, but this only makes things worse, increasing the tension, people abstracting themselves away from interaction by a layer of pandering signage.

Hipsters are selfish, but they only learned it from their yuppie parents. Why buy a hat for $1 from a street-corner vendor when you could just steal one from that posh restaurant? Hey, your scarf was taken a week ago, so you'd might as well make up for it by appropriating someone else's. It's okay, everyone does it, right?

Local telemarketers spam my cellphone with automated calls and SMS at my expense, enough for me to get annoyed about but not enough to make it worth calling T-Mobile to get the charges reversed. My (local) insurance company only covers my care when I'm actually in New York; if I get sick while traveling, either for business or pleasure, I'm out of luck. My dental coverage has me in a twisty maze of passages, all alike, and I don't even know what dentist I'm supposed to go to to get some necessary work done (I just know that if I don't go to the one I'm supposed to go to, it won't be covered), and so my teeth continue to rot from the inside out, like the rest of my body and mind.

My life is a quagmire of apathy and ennui, a reflection of the city I live in.

I hope the cats got to where they need to be.