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So it’s been a while since I posted a blog, mainly because whenever asked why I keep one I always had the sinking feeling that the only answer would be vanity. Three months in New York has cured me of my reticence, in New York vanity is relative. Mainly, I think, because when you’re competing with a city, ego is the only real weapon an urbanite has. Originality is paradoxical since it is the in thing, stature cannot compete with skyscraper, fame and wealth are too common to be sufficient, and absolutes are short on supply so external measures are impossible to find - in the end surviving New York requires believing in yourself to a point that touches on insanity or faith (if you make the distinction).
I turned thirty this year, which remained for me an unimportant milestone until I made the mistake of mentioning it to others. After a couple of weeks of "I cried on my thirtieth, I went over all the things I thought I wanted to be and realised what i was" and "how are you feeling? body falling apart yet?" (which slightly lame joke would have been easier to ignore if I hadn’t started, quite recently, to rely on handrails more when going down stairs due to the horribly consistent knee issue) and "Do you feel old? I can’t believe you’ve reached that stage" with an emphasis on ‘that’ in a manner that made me think yet again I’d missed out on some crucial piece of social knowledge when daydreaming about walking on ceilings or trying to teach my rabbit to climb stairs - as I said after a couple of weeks of this I began to wonder if there was some ceremony necessary to effect a proper transformation between carefree twenties and official and depressed thirtydom. Some sort of physical castration to go with the verbal one would probably have been apt.
Instead I asked my mum to come out to New York (if in doubt ensure the presence of someone who helps you regress to twelve year old mentality) and decided on a quiet dinner with friends. During dinner mum made the mistake of mentioning a German tradition that applied to single women turning thirty, emphasis on single. I think it was some early version of online dating (also big in New York), any woman in such a cursed state was required to go to the local municipal building (town hall, local toilet, whichever was bigger) and sweep the steps in a becoming (and presumably efficient) manner until a male, (any male, human preferable) came and, having perused and found her to his liking, kissed her.
What obligations he had afterwards mum wasn’t sure. If the rules were anything like those in New York he would probably be required to release an income tax statement with dependents and tax breaks highlighted in green, red if under a certain amount. Any which way I had been searching for a suitable marker to another decade successfully completed with only a bare minimum of pratfalls and the socially accepted modicum of mistakes and this seemed about apt. So at about roughly midnight anyone searching for me on my birthday needed only look in the vicinity of an official set of steps for a slightly deranged half asian fulfilling german tradition with a broom made of restaurant napkins in one hand (they’d broken their only functioning broom the night before and new yorkers don’t seem to throw their brooms away) and a bunch of balloons in the other.
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regress?
John 06.29.08 @ 3:52 pm