In New York, Freedom Looks Like too Many Choices...

In New York you can forget, forget how to sit still
Tell yourself you will stay in
But it's down to Alphaville…
-“New York” by U2


With every stop of the subway I could hear the words of Bono start to make sense. One passenger described her relationship with NYC as “love/hate” and I can completely understand. When I first talked to my roommate about the trip last fall, I remember her frowning and saying, “It seems like it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.” And it was. This trip wasn’t designed to give us a comprehensive view of every city, and some sites had to be skipped in favor of the class. But nowhere was that more obvious than in New York.


So often we had to choose between ten different options. Forty minutes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is just a sick joke, but do I miss out on the opportunity to see a Broadway show? Or a hip-hop concert in the Bronx? How is it possible that I managed to miss the MoMA? The Museum of Natural History? The Naked Cowboy?


The constant rush to be somewhere else, the sense of guilt that we weren’t taking full advantage of this city persisted throughout the three days we spent there. The thirty-minute drive from our Jersey parking lot to the Port Authority left me feeling antsy, as though I’d missed another great event while I waited for my bus to emerge from the Lincoln Tunnel. The pressure to choose between too much usually resulted in too much time on the subway and not enough time enjoying the city. A classic rookie mistake, I’d say.


By the time the way was over, I had seen hundreds of moments and signs and events and places that I wanted to write about. But I was so exhausted by that point that I’d fall asleep in my bunk, my laptop balancing on my stomach, and empty Word document open, waiting to be filled (really, ask anyone on the bus).


And yet…even as my body won the battle over creative expression, I would feel guilty that I wasn’t out exploring, getting to know the city. Even if that was just sitting in those tacky lawn chairs in Times Square and watching people pass by. As vital as sleep was at that point, I mentally kicked myself for missing out.


But that’s true for most of the trip, I guess. I just felt it more acutely in New York City, for some reason. Maybe because it is the city people think of when they think of America. There’s no other city quite like it. Chicago feels like a series of neighborhoods, so vastly different from each other that you can forget you’re in a metropolitan area. New York never lets you forget where you are.

Maybe it’s because New York is such a center for so many American fields. Finance, film, theatre, higher education, politics, media, religion, sports…New York is a major player in almost every field. It crams so much American culture into such a tiny area that it feels like a twisted, Tim Burton version of Disneyland’s Main Street U.S.A., a glaring representation of what is both good and terrible about America.


No matter the reason, all of the feelings of “missing out” along the trip came to a head in New York. It really felt like a mile wide and an inch deep, when there were so many areas to delve into. I can only imagine what it must be like for a new immigrant to the country, leaving Ellis Island and trying to navigate new-found freedom in a place with so many choices.


Still, overwhelming as it was, with that sense of missing out is the desire to keep looking. Like New York, I want to go back to almost every city we’ve visited. I want to look at new cities that weren’t on the trip with a similar eye. I can no longer be content with sitting still.