A City of Strangers...

I've been listening to Company a lot, lately. Not only is it one of my all-time favorite musicals, but I also feel strangely connected to it at the moment. In any case, I've been struck lately by the interesting and somewhat saddening concept of the loneliness of New York City.

With a population of nearly 8.2 million people in the five boroughs, and nearly 19 million people in the metropolitan area, NYC is literally crawling with people. You'd think that with so many people around that you would never get a moment's privacy, that you'd always be interacting with someone. I mean, there are 27.5 thousand people per square mile (71 thousand per square mile in Manhattan), so being alone seems out of the question. What's really sad about this place, however, is that even though everyone is literally right on top of each other, everyone moves about their daily lives in a kind of isolation. Maybe it's a coping mechanism to deal with how crowded it is, but I just can't shake the feeling as I walk the streets that I'm completely alone in a sea of strangers.

Now typically I don't mind being alone. I can function just fine by myself, and very frequently require some alone time to recharge. But in spite of that, I don't like to be isolated. And I think that most humans, really, don't like that either. We are a very social animal, afterall. So I guess that is just another way in which New York City is an anomaly. It's a strange place, where everything is expensive, everything is far away, and everything is inconvenient, despite the fact that anything you could want is right around the corner.

It's far too early to tell, yet, but there's a good chance that I'm more of a mid-sized city kind of guy. I like Pittsburgh a lot. Maybe it's because I grew up there, and went to school there, and the fact that it's an integral part of my identity, but I just felt a sense of connection to the place and the people in it. I may have been alone sometimes, but I did not feel isolated. Hopefully once I get used to being here and carve out a little niche for myself in the city, and start making some more friends, I will start to feel some of the connection I have with Pittsburgh for New York. I mustn't get ahead of myself, though. I've only bee here for 1.5 weeks, and I'm still adjusting to one of the biggest (if not the biggest) transitions I've ever made in my life. Nearly everything about my life has changed in some way in the past 4 or 5 weeks, and I think I had been busy enough in my first week or so here that I kind of forgot about it for a minute. Now that I'm settling into a routine, that vague sense that I'm in the twilight zone is returning a little, nagging at the corner of my consciousness.

Well, I'd love to continue this introspection, but it's time for me to head into the City of Strangers to become just one of Another 100 People Getting Off of the Train.

Keep calm and carry on.