Second Thoughts

Today, for the first time, returning to New York felt like coming home. I couldn't imagine more beautiful weather, which brings everyone outside and creates an overall sense of camaraderie with everyone you meet. You can really feel it in the air--totally infectious. Coming from a visit to Philadelphia, I had a strange sense that New York is, paradoxically, a cozy city. Everything is packed in, and the variety between neighborhoods keeps it from feeling claustrophobic or depressing. Our apartment isn't big, but I like the feeling that I am using all of the space, that nothing is wasted, that there's a degree of intelligence with which everything is laid out.

The chinatown-to-chinatown bus is a cheap and wonderful (if rather disorganized) way to travel, if you can survive walking through chinky street vendors and sewage, of course. Round trip for twenty bucks, I visited Austin and Duncan who are settling into an apartment and post-bacculurate classes at UPenn. We had a night of utter ridiculousness and consternation: I climbed a tree and couldn't get down, we met a tall black man named "Country" who promised Austin protection in West Philly and claimed to have fathered seven children (which Nick then asked, concernedly, if he ever visited), we found our way into a party at a Beta OIT which Nick insisted on finding, Duncan refused to speak anything but a combination of French and Korean for what seemed like hours, we met two guys who read Pitchfork (which I apparently thought was the most incredulous coincidence one could ever imagine, evidenced by my shaking Nick and repeatedly yelling the news into his ear), Austin relieved himself on the tire of a Jeep on a busy road and also honored a lesson from Country on how to box effectively.

Philadelphia is a nice town with a goofy trolly car subway which feels like a ride at Disney Land. People were friendly and genuinely interested. The UPenn campus is fantastic and feels like a different world from the rest of the city--you walk in the gates and there is a sudden dead quiet. We visited the library and spent a half hour gawking at the size of it. I had an overwhelming feeling of smallness walking through the stacks, knowing that just one of the bookshelves was more than I could read in the rest of my lifetime. Seeing old novels from forgotten writers discouraged me, too--nobody reads them, and even if there is some permanence in a book's publication and printing, what's the use of it? People who wrote those books are immortal only in a theoretical sense, only if somebody pulls it off the shelf and cares about it. Too few people have read Moby Dick for it to matter.


I finally organized my bookshelf, which was a more difficult than I expected. For the first time I have most of my books with me, and I went from putting them together by author, then genre and author, then just genre, then by size, then by (would you believe it?) color scheme. I settled on genre followed by an equal balance of recentness of purchase, size, and approximate date of publication. I'm sure it will change soon enough.

I don't know what to say about Katrina, only that the best I can do is flood myself with pictures and video clips until they garner an emotional impact, because otherwise I feel totally isolated from it. The op-ed section of the Times has been really good. Everyone should take 10 minutes and donate to Red Cross on their website, use your credit card. I'm not normally preachy, but there's really no other option.

Not looking forward to work tomorrow, but I suppose it's only four days. And this weekend I'm not going anywhere, finally--just spending a weekend in the fourth largest city in the world, which, for the first time today, definitely felt like home.