ZOMG Unbelievable!

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

lol, i never noticed the MA thing before. i haz a blind.

 

new york does have better brownstones, tho.

[Leelou]

I love NYC too! So much shopping! And Broadway!

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

i wish i could have afforded to stay after high school. it was the only place in the world i was ever considered well socialized.

[hazelkrs1]

(oh, and btw, i think you'd be able to get along with most new yorkers. i always did, and i'm not good at the getting along thing. new yorkers know how to give you space where there isn't any and not make eye contact.)

 

I actually find that difficult to deal with or get used to. No eye contact in public makes me uncomfortable. I feel like were all in some futuristic sci-fi movie like Logan's Run or something like that in which everything is so bleak that we can't look each other in the eye

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

no. it's like you're in an incredibly overcrowded space and you have no room to live or to breathe or to just have one second to not be seen or jostled, and if in addition to all this closeness you were being stared down, it would be compeltely unbearable, and you'd feel like you were under attack. which i never did there, but often do here. and the looking people in the eye thing can be a form of aggression among primates, along with the smiling. and i've always found that people who look you in the eye and smile are no less likely to stab you in the back than those who give you some space and politely avert their eyes when they can.

 

and by you i mean me.

[hazelkrs1]

I see the necessity for such a practice, but it still felt alien to me. And I don't mean I want to have people staring at me, but there just seems to be this thing there that everyone is dedicated to having as little meaningful human interaction in public as possible. I'm the kind of person that likes talking to strangers and having odd conversations with someone you've never met before.

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

i've had plenty of odd conversations with strangers in new york. i wouldn't have if they'd been aggressively friendly and overbearing. it's nice to have the option not to have the conversation.

[hazelkrs1]

true. How did the conversations get started then?

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

going back 30+ years, i couldn't give you the script. they just did.

[hazelkrs1]

Either way, I've only visited it before, never lived there, and I still had a blast. Good times!

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

it's different when you live there i guess. don't think i could ever do it again even if i could afford it. but it was an intersting place to grow up.

[hazelkrs1]

Do you still have an accent?

[Mrs. Cindy Gill]

never did

[hazelkrs1]

My mom was raised in queens. I pride myself on being able to tell the differences between NY accents without ever having lived there