Lightbulb Over Head Blog

I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe in this:

Sooner or later, everyone will drop anchor in New York City.

Be it a year, a semester abroad, or a long weekend, people from all around the world will pay a visit to the place my father reverently calls “The Center of the Universe.”

I’ve said a few disparaging or disheartening things about this urban labyrinth, but I wouldn’t be living here if I didn’t love it. However, I’m not so in love with this city that I can’t recognized the misplaced overconfidence in this statement.

There is an undeniable dream-like quality that accompanies the uttering of the words “New York.” I want to be a part of it. My little home is on the 100th floor. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. It’s the city that never sleeps. Lets face it, if Amy Adams endorses New York City as the perfect place to unfold a fairy tale in her movie Enchanted, I’m inclined to believe her. She’s just so darn cute!

In my five years living here, I’ve ventured to tourist hot-spots like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’ve also discovered my own treasures, like the gorgeous story-book fountain by City Hall that is lit with gas lamps, their flames flickering like smoldering ballerina feet in the night. I’ve enjoyed a disparate array of cuisines from street food to five star restaurants. No matter how long I’m here, the infinite well of the city provides me with more scope for the imagination and my taste buds. Where else can you get pad thai delivered to your door at 3 AM?

I love the ability to disappear amongst the metal spires of skyscrapers and at the same time, I stand by the fact that even in this massive city, I still run into friends on the street. They vary from close friends to long lost coworkers. While this may not be everyone’s last stop, it certainly makes everyone’s “must see” list. I’ve crossed paths with almost every important person in my life while treading the metropolitan asphalt.

People always want to visit me here to get a proper tour from a “real New Yorker.” I love having them and it’s incredibly convenient and cost effective for me. Like Hermes, the Greek god of hospitality, I accept all visitors and newcomers with dutiful open arms, suggesting interesting off-the-beaten-path attractions and helping foreigners find the best subway routes- and I’m not the only one! Once, when my mom was on business here for her law firm, it was raining heavily and a man saw her without an umbrella and promptly walked her all the way back to her hotel, not taking no for an answer. When they arrived, he said, “Don’t ever let anyone tell you New Yorkers aren’t nice.” Then he promptly disappeared into the sea of passing umbrellas leaving no name and no trace.

However, I find I’m leaving the city less and less. It makes me ponder how this affects my mental health and most importantly my sense of perspective. New York might be a centrifuge for culture and commerce, but I’m not sure that it really is the center of the universe and without question, it isn’t the only place that matters inside of it.

New York sometimes feels like an inescapable womb in the process of breeding and evolving a new strain of subhuman. I shall call them:

Turtle People.

Just kidding.

But not really. Let’s take a ride, shall we?

When you decide to live in New York City, you run the risk of becoming a Turtle Person. I once stumbled up on this phenomena, and by stumbled upon I mean coined this term myself, while discussing what a battle it is to navigate the NYC subway system, pick up your morning coffee, and arrive at work unscathed and on time. I was commiserating with my friend, Pam, about how alone you can feel even in a packed subway car and how everyone moves through their day with their head inside their shell until they require food or some other service, and then they pop their heads out, blazing with this incredibly unattractive, blinding sense of entitlement. If two Turtle People pop their heads out of their shells at the same time…

The results could be disasterous.

This is the danger of letting New York trap you. which I don’t necessarily mean in a physical sense. It’s very easy to get sucked into a grueling routine. Every weekday, when I plunge down into the subway at rush hour, I begin to feel my turtle shell forming and hardening. I bend my elbows, clench my fists, and forge ahead through the flow of people towards the turn-styles. I used my shoulders defensively, protecting my iPhone like a linebacker driving the ball through a veritable phalanx of opposition. I brace myself as I weed through people rushing at me, trying just as fervently to go in the opposite direction, all of our shells thickening as we advance deeper into the underbelly of the city. I arrive at the doors of my train as they are closing. In my way: A tiny old woman who is unsure of whether or not to enter.

“MOVE!” I bellow at her, head emerging from my shell as I try desperately to make my train. I completely ignore the fact that the woman could be a tourist who doesn’t understand English and I disregard that old platitude about “respecting your elders.”

You get the picture? Turtle People. Tell your friends.

That’s the risk you run when you live here. Of course, there’s a degree of expectation that you will get used to all of the people packed into small spaces. At first its just a matter of putting on your headphones and getting to a state of Zen, but eventually, this develops into a defensiveness and a willingness to be combative. It’s a jungle out there and you have to eat or be eaten from time to time.

At the other end of the spectrum, I have also felt the immense power of communal love in New York City. Last summer, my parents and I were in a car accident on the Upper West Side. We were in a cab on our way home from my graduation from NYU. I was in a gentle slumber, leaning on my mother’s shoulder. I was full of good food and celebratory dreams when I was shaken from my sleep by the perpendicular impact of our taxi with a woman’s car that was speeding across town. I woke, crumpled against the divider. Stupidly none of us were wearing seat belts and I was completely disoriented. My mother was gasping for breath, repeating the words, “My chest is crushed.” The combined weight of me and my father had slammed into her and sharply knocked the wind out of her. As I got my bearings, I realized my father was clutching his head. I could see his head had a huge gash across his forehead. He was talking quickly and saying “I’m ok,” not to mention trying to tell a few jokes as he stumbled out onto the street. I knew he couldn’t be too badly hurt because his jokes were at the same degree of “corny” that they always are, but the blood made it look worse than it was.

I followed him, trying to help him settle on the curb when I noticed how many people were rushing out of their stores onto the street. Apparently the crash had been rather loud. People gathered around us, trying to help my dad and steadying me as I dropped my diploma and my program. They carefully began checking my face and arms for scrapes and blood.

“I have to get my mom,” I said to the woman who was leading me to the sidewalk, but when we turned towards the cab, a gentleman was already helping her, supporting her weight on his arm. As an EMT student who happened to be passing helped my dad into the neck brace he was carrying with him, a shop-owner brought out plastic chairs and bottled water for me and my mother.

The traffic on Broadway had been brought to a halt and as my senses reawakened and the pounding in my head subsided, I realized that for every person that was helping us on our side of the street, just as many were helping the female driver who had hit us on the other side.

When I looked at my dad lying on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely from his forehead, I started to lose it and began to cry. I didn’t see her approaching, but a homeless woman put her hand on my shoulder. Normally I would have glared and pulled away in disgust, but that day I didn’t. She squeezed my shoulder with her warm leathery hand and said. “He’s going to be OK, Mama.” She smiled reassuringly. I stopped crying as we locked eyes and she calmed me down with her steady, concerned gaze.

I kept dropping the papers I was holding. The woman who was looking after my mother picked them up for me. She noted the purple NYU insignia on them and smiled. “I went there. What a great school!”

“I g-graduated today.” I stammered. It was all I could think to say.

She giggled good naturedly and looked between my mom and me, taking both of our hands. “You’ll remember this day for the rest of your lives!” We all laughed.

That day was such a testament to the spirit of New York- the spirit that got this amazing city through immense tragedy and hardship during 9/11/2001, the spirit that made that Wesley Autrey Sr. leap onto the slippery tracks of the New York Subway in order to hold down 19 year old epileptic, Cameron Hellopeter, saving his life by keeping his shaking body still as the train passed over them.

So yes, we run the risk of becoming Turtle People, but being here isn’t always a battle. Sometimes it’s the greatest opportunity of your lifetime and an absolute honor to be a New Yorker.

It has been a long time since I last felt patriotic. The sound of “Proud to be an American” makes my skin crawl and decidedly ashamed to be an American.

That feeling of my stomach turning is so far from the joy I got from marching in the Memorial Day Parade in Chicago as a child. I would innocently dress up my pink, purple, and white tricycle with red, white, and blue streamers. I remember my mom and dad twisting the small silver wires to make a white dove with real feathers bought from some arts and craft store roost beneath my seat. It was truly a glorious vehicle to behold.

We would march, ride, rollerblade, and walk through the city with drums rat-a-tat-tatting all the way the way to the park. They thundered so loudly in your heart and when you closed your mouth, you could feel the sonic vibrations in your teeth. Additionally, I remember these colorful packs of jelly candies that they gave out every year when we got to our final destination in the park. They did acrobatics and someone important gave a speech. That was always the boring bit as a child, but I was way too busy eating my jelly candy and giggling with my friends from the neighborhood to care much.

I also have fond memories of going to Connecticut in the summertime to celebrate 4th of July with my father’s side of the family. Our current patriarch, my dad’s oldest brother Jack, invited every member of our clan to his house for the weekend and we would set up a volley ball net and I would swing on the swing that hung from the massive branch of the  giant oak tree out front. There was also a fish pond in the backyard and a big log that I would climb across and pretend that it was the gateway to another world. We would cook burgers and laugh and when the evening settled down, we would all watch a classic movie like Sunset Boulevard or Psycho. It was a time to feel the love of family and reunite and refresh. It almost felt like New Year’s Eve in the sense that I sort of measured my childhood years by the arrival of the 4th of July.

As I grew older, these small acts of patriotism faded. I grew out of my tricycle. The Connecticut house burned down. I began going to summer camp in North Carolina and I simply began to loath family dinner parties and the baggage of having that one evening to give people information and updates on my life by which they could measure my progress from the previous Thanksgiving or whenever we had spoken last. I enjoyed seeing people of course, but I always felt tremendous pressure. As an actress, I wanted to make my parents proud of what I was doing or I wanted to be seen as successful in an industry that is “hard” if not impossible.

My innocent idolatry of the red, white, and blue became like some distant memory.

The closest I came to patriotism was watching Independence Day when Bill Pullman gave the big speech before the epic battle with the Alien race that wants to take over Earth.

In that movie as a whole and especially during that speech, there is a collective sense of community and duty in the face of death. It connects American independence with the rest of the globe. I think I was attracted to it because as I was growing up, I really felt like America was an island. I was very blessed to be able to travel around the world to Italy, France, the United Kingdom, Ecuador, Turkey, and Greece. I was exposed to other views of America from outside of our borders. I remember that I was roaming the streets of Paris as a child and looking into the glass window of a Patisserie. The owner of the shop rushed out and ushered me away to my American parents who were just down the block finishing their French morning coffee and croissants. The shopowner was not happy to have some American child poking around his window and pushed me towards my father before stomping back up the street and into his store.

When I was doing a theater exchange with some students from England, they were very welcoming but wouldn’t stop pestering us about how in God’s green earth President George Bush had been re-elected. I had to remind them that none of us, who were in our junior and senior years of high school, were old enough to vote. However, nothing I said could assail them. They wanted to know how our country could have been so dumb.

As a liberally minded young American, I became increasingly upset at many of the topics brought into the spotlight during the Bush Administration. In my mind, so many of them were connected to religion. Many of the protests against gay marriage focused on the fact that the Bible “tells us” that marriage is specifically for a man and a woman. Whatever happened to the separation of church and state? Why should the Christian God dictate what our citizens of varying religions should do? So many Bible Thumpers were in arms over A Woman’s Right to choose. I agree that this is a sensative subject, but I just don’t think that anyone should be able to dictate what I can and can’t do with my body. The rate of teen pregnancy is increasing in our country and more and more and our young men and women are starting families before they are ready. On top of this, the administration wanted to stop stem cell research, research that could help to find a cure any number of diseases that our world faces. In a way, stem cell research gives new life to these “pre” humans by using them to advance our knowledge and understanding of the human body and the development of new medicines and treatments to help us thrive and save lives.

After 9/11, I was devastated just like everyone else. It was just such a horrible tragedy. I could try to quantify my emotions and the events that followed it, but that is not really the subject of this article. However I will say that somewhere inside of myself, there was a tug on the string of my patriotism. I think it would have blossomed if I hadn’t been overwhelmed by the mass marketing of everything blindly patriotic that poured from middle America. Perhaps I shouldn’t have looked down on it all, but honestly, as I said at the outset of this peice, the song “Proud to be An American” makes my stomach turn because it is so mind-numbingly broad. Words like freedom and liberty are so much a part of our collective conciousness that they begin to loose meaning with every use. I think we take them for granted as does that song. It employs almost every one and manages to fill up verses and choruses while actually not saying much of anything at all. America as a whole became so inarticulate after 9/11 that I became desensitized to the American flag. It was on bookbags, pins, T-shirts, miniflags, keychains- EVERYWHERE. The flag itself became a pop sensation. No wonder no one took us seriously. No one takes Britney Spears seriously.

Near the end of Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s musical, 1776, John Addams wonders on the eve of the signing of the Declaration of Independence if anyone sees America the way he does. I am including the lyrics here for anyone who has not seen the show. I am including the sequence here for your viewing pleasure.

I began to feel a bit like Addams in this number. “Is Anybody There? Does Anybody Care? Does Anyboy See What I See?” I saw the lifeblood of true America dying a little each day.  I saw our liberties being questioned and taken from us one by one.

This year, everything changed for me. Barack Obama was elected our 44th President of the United States of America. As a Chicagoan, I knew he was the man for the job almost immediately after I heard he was running. I knew it would be a hard road, but for the first time in a long time, I hung on to a hope for this country. I invested in current events and our national progress. Instead of writing off this war as an egregious nightmare created by the Bush Administration, I saw a man capable of ending our part in the turmoil and I what’s more, I listened and I felt connected to those lost, and those still fighting.

I know that in recent articles I have been disparaging about the spirit I sometimes feel while living in New York City. However, I haven’t mentioned that the true strength of our community sometimes shines so brightly that I am left gaping in awe. I have felt it several times, but I will tell you that on Election Night 2008, New York City came alive. Cars zipped through Bushwick in Brooklyn with loudspeakers chanting Obama’s name. People smiled at each other in the East Village and waved American flags not because thats what they were obligated to do to support our country but because they were moved to raise our country’s iconic colors. In Time’s Square, the lights shown with hope and triumph, and not with amusement park neon.

In his iconic speech from Election night 2008, Barck Obama reminded me that we are not a collection of red and blue states, but that we are forevermore the United States. I realize that I am capable of prejudice, that in this post I have called middle America uncultured, and called recent national patriotism into question. I have pointed many fingers. I know have a lot to learn and I am not saying that I don’t believe it can come from being exposed to opinions from other parts of our great Nation. But today.

Today we stand United. Today, I am proud to be an American. Today somebody is there. Today is our Independence Day.