Lee Lee's Big Adventure

It has been three days now since I left the midwest to come to the Big Apple of New York City to find my life. An adventure is one way of calling it. It most certainly is that. The questions I got so frequently when I told people I was going ranged from, "Why?" to "You know it's expensive out there, don't you?"
I felt like these kinds of questions were mostly rhetorical and did not necessarily need or deserve an answer. But no matter what my answer was, I always got a resounding "Good Luck" out of them, which was very reassuring. It's nice to know when you embark on a journey like this that so many people have got your back. I am certainly a special case, with the amount of family and friends that I have. It is still an adventure, nonetheless.
And now that I'm here, I feel as though I never left. I fit right in. I do my walking, I do my subway riding. I do my food-getting, I do my show-watching. Nothing's really changed except for the amount of people I have to support me. Even if I did not have the support, though, I still feel like I could make it. I feel like New York, or any big city for that matter, is only as scary as you make it. A big city is the same as any city. It's just bigger. There are still neighborhoods and landmarks. There are still movie theaters and stoplights. When you increase the size of the population, you're going to have more stuff.
I think that's a concept small-town people cannot grasp sometimes.
"How can you want to be where there are so many people?" they'd say.
I just fit in with the masses, just like anyone else. There are already eight million people living here. How's one more going to make a difference? I don't actually feel like I live here yet. Maybe it's because I don't have my own place yet. Or a job. But my familiarity with the city makes it a whole lot easier. When I go to New York anymore, I never feel like a tourist. I never feel like I'm seeing something for the first time. I've not seen the whole city, by any means, but when I walk around, though, when I swipe my MetroCard, I feel like I have the living-in-New York attitude.
A few of the things I have noticed on my travels throughout the city are as follows. One does not have to push a button and wait for the crossing signal if one wants to cross the street. Why? Because every street corner is equipped with the cross signals automatically. It is rare to find a street corner without them, and would probably be a pretty unfamiliar sight to a New Yorker. I've noticed that when riding on the subways, people seem to have developed "subway legs" as could be similarly identified to "sea legs". It will probably take a while, but I sometime hope to develop the skill of being able to stand up on a moving subway, not holding on to anything, and remain standing as the train comes to a screeching halt without toppling over.
One of the hardest parts about walking around New York is that there are no easily accessible bathrooms to stop off at whenever you feel the urge. If you are not in an area where you know somebody, or that has a public restroom, you're probably going to be holding it for a while. And when you're walking, it just makes it worse. So, when you've got a place to go and you've got the urge, even if it's just a little, you're going to find out sooner or later that you had better take the time to relieve yourself before it turns into a medical situation.
One of the things most likely to deter a person from coming to New York is all the horror stories they hear. Crimes that happen in the big city means crimes happen to people in the big city, and if you're one of the people in the big city, crimes are going to happen to you. Like I said before, New York is only as scary as you make it. You've got to know the situation you're going into.
Crime and horror stories happen everywhere. And, just like an economics problem, when you increase the number of people who can commit crime and who can be victims of it, you're going to have more crime. If you paint a picture in your mind of New York as a dark city where crack whores and rapists lurk around every corner, it's not going to be a very appealing place. But if you remember that New York is just full of people, more and more people, people who don't necessarily give a damn about you, but are just living and trying to get out of life what they want.
Some of them get what they want in a negative or illegal fashion, but that's not for me to decide. Some of them are really nice people, just looking out for one another. Today a guy came around the corner facing me and informed me that my zipper was down. He didn't stop to talk or reach for my wallet, even though he could have. Do you think I didn't appreciate him telling me my zipper was down? I did tremendously. I had no idea my zipper was down, sometimes it just goes down. But I certainly didn't want to keep walking around with my zipper down. The point is, I have no idea who that guy was. He has no idea who I am. I'm never gonna see him again. He's never gonna see me again. And we are both fine with that.
I am going to estimate that about ninety percent of people don't care about you. That doesn't mean they're not going to be nice to you, but it probably means that they are not out to get you. I've been affected by crime in every city I've lived in. I don't see the risk in going to another city. There's probably going to be a time when I'll have to face crime again. Hopefully it won't be anything too terrible.
I am about to enter into my first weekend as a New Yorker. It is probably going to be fun. I hope it is. It also means that my first week as a New Yorker will be coming to a close soon, which means I'll have one more week to become an official New Yorker before I get kicked out of my faux New Yorker residence. So I guess I'll keep on walking along, and I hope I can keep my zipper up.