New York City Ghosts

What if New York is over me?

Hullo, welcome to choitotheworld. I’m Mary H.K. Choi, a New York Times Bestselling Author, Essayist, screenwriter living in New York. I also identify as a person with Autism (complimentary). A history of disordered eating (mixed bag). And ADHD (fun when manic). You can also find me here or here.

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I think there’s something happening to me. I’ve seen it happen to other people. That thing where a person who lives in New York suddenly befalls a million tiny calamities. Death by a trillion indignations. I was telling my friend Tanya about this over dinner the other week. We went to Hungry Thirsty in Carroll Gardens which is what Ugly Baby used to be and it was good but they told us, swear to god, 60 minutes into our dinner, to scram because they had to turn the table over.

Which, honestly, fair enough. It felt in keeping with the theme.

can you imagine digging a citibike out? EML

In any case, what I was telling Tanya (sorry, sidebar: her book, Will This Make You Happy, is coming out in March, it’s a narrative cookbook and it’s very good. I will leave the link here) was that I suddenly felt cursed. In a minor but perniciously persistent way.

I’d had all the bad luck with the subway. That’s to be expected. Only psychos ever feel personally targeted by the MTA. But even as I began leaving earlier and earlier for my appointments, I was still 8 minutes late to everything. It felt like Zeno’s paradox for mass transit and I just couldn’t fight it. There were countless little things. A credit card that stopped working. I lost ONE glove. My bag spilled out in very close quarters in a restaurant without coat check and I managed to retrieve everything except my AirPods.

“It’s New York City Ghosts,” I said spookily to Tanya as we left the restaurant into the freezing black night. I wouldn’t find out until about an hour later that I’d left all my leftovers inside. Leftovers that were going to be so good for lunch the next day with an egg. Anyway, I says to Tanya, “Holy shit. What if I’m a New York City Ghost?”

New York City Ghosts is that phenomenon that everyone who lives in New York is familiar with. It’s what happens when one of your friends just become spectacularly unlucky. It’s like Dead New Yorker Walking. It’s when the New York you inhabit is the Bardo. You’ve already moved back to your parents’ house or the town you went to high school in. Or to Colorado, or a suburb of Austin, or Los Angeles…. but you’re operating on a delay. You’re gone but you just don’t know it yet.

It happened all the time in our twenties and thirties. It was the friend whose ATM card always went missing. Whose phone was constantly in shards. Whose bag got stolen at the bar twice in a row on the same night they were locked out of their apartment and had to call the locksmith at 3AM. On the same week they got dumped and got fired.

It’s like when New York has chosen you. Smudged chalk on your jacket like carnies indicating to others that you’re a rube. A mark. Every chaos goblin has an APB out on this person. The way crows can carry out a vendetta and collude with their crow friends if they are deadset on exacting vengeance on an unsuspecting mortal.

There’s no shortage of essays on what it’s like to leave New York. There are a trillion terrific reasons to get out of The City but not so much to do when New York is done with you. When New York is actively ejecting you like a transplant that won’t take.

This is what the town feels like lately. To me. At me. ALL OVER ME. Even after twenty years. It’s not new for me to complain about New York (again: see above meme) but holy hell, this one’s bad.

I am near constantly teetering right at the precipice of depression every winter—but especially this one—barely able to drink water, let alone go outside for health walks, never mind that there is an absolutely hazardous amount of dog poop on any part of the sidewalk that isn’t a mound of frozen solid yellow snow.

I know that New York isn’t the problem. God, the self-importance to even feel like a city would target me is deranged. I know it’s everything. It’s that rent is due in Minneapolis. That the weather is killing people. That I’m worried about our town’s small businesses surviving this fucking season and closing their doors in solidarity during the National Shutdown.

My problem is I am overwhelmed by all there is to do. What it will take to actually make things better when I am capable of so little. This is very much a me problem. Not the town. New York has ice floes in the East River and I am swimming upstream. Even this city slows down in the winter even if the urgency and busyness remains the same.

I’m forgetting what I know. You put your hat and scarf in your coat sleeves but you put your gloves in your buttoned pockets or your zippered bag. You go crossbody bag instead of shoulder over your coat. You can only ever do two things a day in New York. Period. No matter the seasons but especially in winter. Two. It doesn’t matter how small the second thing is, if it requires a location, even if you’re only going to be there for 5 minutes, that’s the second.

Try to do any more and you will experience resistance. You will feel thwarted. But are you thwarted and smote or are you choosing chaos and resentment?

Stackpal and author, R.O. Kwon, shared this interview with MN organizer Aru Shiney-Ajay from Labor Politics about how people are organizing to target businesses supporting ICE on the ground in small, winnable, material ways. Like blocking them from getting to their rental cars. Or booking up hotels so they can’t stay there.

At Home Depot, there have been instances of people lining up to buy ice scrapers and then getting in line to return them, in a way that clogs the lines. It’s not illegal, you’re not spending more than $2 that you get back within an hour, and it can be done at scale.

And it reminds me about small actions. Being the $2 ice scraper that you want to see in the world. It’s about getting outside of myself and the paper cut on my cuticle and my minuscule accretive grievances and get a grip that I have heat in my apartment and remember that it is persimmon season as I purchase gift cards from my neighborhood stores and restaurants like it’s COVID times again because I love them. And make a donation to Stand With Minnesota without being embarrassed about the amount.

The funny thing is that I found my AirPods. I found them on “Find My” only to watch them go from the restaurant where I’d dropped them to the Bronx then back to the restaurant then back up, then back down again, and not for nothing if those commutes weren’t happening at 4 in the morning. So another small thing was to unpair them and just let them go. They were already not mine. No sense in haunting them.

If you enjoyed this free post, please enjoy these other ones to catch a vibe of my myriad complaints.

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