In New York, I hypothesize that making a new Instagram account will make me feel better. The timing isn’t ideal, a man on the street awkwardly stopped me on the street yesterday and fumbled a peanut butter cup out of a four-pack sleeve of Reese’s. He was kind, clumsy, with a verbal agility I find rare in the people I surround myself with. The people I love are quick and witty, but their cadence is smooth, and their comments disguised under layers of sarcasm or passion, and I am attracted to their words and idiosyncrasies as they draw me in through familiarity and excitement. The man asked my age, which everybody appears to be interested in lately, and then for my Instagram account (men on the street ask me for my Instagram about once a year, usually in the summertime, usually amidst a self-indulgent pouting). I gave him my username, watched him type it in. I know I will not accept the request. I know Instagram has sat in my safari browser for a month now, by which every function the app allows is also available except for the ability to open photo direct messages and to view follow requests.
This is unfortunate, but it works in my favor. It let's me stay right where I am. The people around me are growing up; they casually date in a less psychotic way than I have tried and failed in the past, enacting on their newfound liberation instead of manipulating and eventually depleting it until finding themselves ridden with newfound nerves. They can hold a job for longer than a week, which is something I also cannot do.
I am overplaying my current level of self-degradation, I am happy for my friends, less happy for those who are not my friends. In fact, I am happier for my friends than I have ever felt before and because of this, I resent and ridicule others around me. This of course, means any one of the ten million people I could bump into at any given moment is subject to my angst and criticism. Everyone in New York, they who oscillate their gaze in your direction as you sit perpendicular from one another on the train, they who plead with you as you begin to flip around the iPad POS system without a credit card tip as you try to blink back "isweariputitinthejar" without seeming too haughtily charitable, they who mangle and who disarm with every street corner turned and turnstile passed, they are neighbors in a city that has dismantled love (at least, for me). Do they know more about the alt lit community than I do where do they eat for lunch where do they get a brazillian wax where do they see their movies. Endless search for knowledge.
Perhaps, the way I feel in New York would be unimportant; an irreverent, disillusioned, rant from a mousey twenty-year-old girl in the comfort of her parent’s bedroom (for it appears as though I exist as an ode to mumble core; a sadistic Baumbachian fantasy), if the fear did not feel so easily penetrable from each by passer. I will spare the anger and disillusionment of New York that I am coming to terms with after twenty years (sure) as it reads (and feels) as nothing more than silly whining. For now I’ll kill time until August, occasionally thinking about “Goodbye to All that” (I haven’t even read the whole book, just the free web pdf) and thanking God for Joan Didion, the Queen of Cool, for letting me feel like less of a loser in being so frustrated with the city that breeds ingenuity and aloofness.