My Kind of Town

San Francisco is my kind of town.
Evidently.
At least that’s what the weird Facebook quiz just told me. In a test to see which city I should be living in, I wound up in California. At least metaphorically.
Granted, I was trying to wind up in New York. That’s why I voted for a place with high housing costs. Or at least said that I don’t mind high housing costs. Cause the places with low housing costs tend to be spots in which I do not want to live. Anyway, I think that my pro-Asian-food answer may also have helped land me in San Francisco. The truth is that I’d just as soon have a pizza, but there was no place to say that.
Usually I avoid Facebook quizzed like the plague. They seem like gigantic time-wasters. But after reading one jerk’s post about how the test sent him to live in Denver, Colorado…well, I began to wonder what kind of response I would get.
It was weird, too, cause I’ve been feeling a little bit under assault in the city lately. I mean that literally. Last night, Halloween, I was in a car that was hit by…was it a pumpkin? Something hard and squishy that landed on the car we hired to bring us back from the Bronx last night. It was no big deal, but it was no small one either. Cause it reminded me of being harassed on the street about two weeks ago at Herald Square. And of that time a couple of years ago I was bugged by a screaming teenager on a subway.
The little assaults start to add up. And I’m at the age where they become a little bit harder to shake off. Or is that nonsense, blaming age? I know the key to this, and to just about everything else, is to bounce back as quickly as possible. My basic rule—the one I carry around in the New York part of my brain—is to say to myself that if I have not been murdered and if there’s no slicing of my skin, then I’m fine. Good to go. Back to the streets of the big city.
The truth, though, lies somewhere else. I feel just a tad less safe than I used to. In New York and in general. I wish this were not so, but pretending otherwise, ignoring how I feel about things, would hardly be a New Yorker's kind of move. We do tend to call them as we see them. Right now I'm admitting to a sense of danger out there, but I also see the amazing interactions each day in this city. The woman in Washington Square who hands cash to the fellow standing next to her who lost it. The oh-so-many people who do things like that for me. The guy over the weekend who picked up the woman who was falling at Whole Foods.
I can think about those people instead of the incredibly flying objects. Think about the people who help instead of the ones who harass. It helps. I may be better off switching thoughts instead of switching cities.