New York Rudeness

Posted November 18th, 2003 by Sean Williams

Ian posted a blog a few days back about Times Square and the Subway and although I couldn’t disagree more about the content, the writing was fantastic and his rants are basically what we pay him for, so I’m not going to try to pick apart his loathing of Manahattan. He once said to me “you can’t go to a whorehouse and expect to be loved” and if he said it to me, I’m sure he’s also said it to himself at some point.

Anyway, there is an aspect to New York that I hate. Everyone here, your neighbors, your friends and people you don’t know at all, feel free to discuss their opinions of your behavior in the rudest terms. Ian complained about the group silence in the subway terminals, and I have to say, I enjoy this a thousand times more than the casual observation.

If you are walking in to your house with an overflowing armload of groceries, someone you don’t know will feel free to holler, “Yo! You ought to make two trips, you’re gonna drop something!”

They feel okay about pointing out what you’re doing wrong, they go so far as to postulate a way you could be doing it better and yell it, but an ice age could come and go before they held the door open for you.

I spent some time yesterday making business calls. Only one person did I have to leave a message on her answering machine. She called me back, we spoke for ten seconds while I gave her the information she already had on her answering machine, and as she was getting off the phone she said, “I wanted to call and check because some of us didn’t get the message.”

I mean, a) we changed the time by half and hour to help the people I called, not me, b) all of them got the message from me and c) if none of them got the message from me, *you just got it*. I *just* told you. What improvement on anyone’s life is it for you to try and make it seem as if I am doing it wrong?

I just popped into a CVS to pick up some bridal magazines for Jordana. A guy? Leafing through bridal magazines? Hey, what do I care, I love my girl, I’m helping her out. I picked out two magazines and my eyes began to linger on the heavily aerobicized young ladies on the cover of the Men’s Magazines. “Attractive ladies”, I thought to myself. “Seductively attractive, I would go so far as to say.”

A 180 year old woman was suddenly standing next to me. “Would your bride want you looking at that?” she said. I was holding bridal magazines in my hands, but she had a gnarled witch finger pointing to Maxim.

“Oh, right,” I said, laughing. “Um, yeah, no, yeah…”

“If you’re looking at these magazines,” she said, completely straight faced, “maybe you shouldn’t be buying these magazines” pointing at the ones in my hands.

“Ah,” I said. “Well.” She stared at me. Forcing me to say, “ha ha!” then she walked away.

I am, in fact, marrying a *woman* for chrissakes. Is there some alternate reality where you find only *one* woman attractive? Seriously, I could see if I had “Nuns Weekly” under my arm, or “I Like Boys” or something, but I am marrying an attractive woman. Through some failure on my part, I’m not so attracted to her that I am unable to notice any other beautiful woman in the world, that’s what I did wrong.

Sure, I went out of my way to try to help my confused bride find some kind of way of making this wedding okay, the wedding that I asked her to have with me, but this frickin’ New Yorker found a way to make me wrong.

Man, I don’t know. You want good writing and coherent ideas, go read Ian’s blog.