Reading over my last post about my web hosting issues, I had to laugh. I have another life apart from music, a company called New York Geek Girls. The name was originally tongue in cheek, but now I have to acknowledge I really am a geek! Who but a geek could rant so passionately for three paragraphs about mail server issues?
Or maybe it’s not my geekiness that inspired those railings. Truth is, I have a low tolerance for stupidity, illogic, and hypocrisy in general. Just today, I wandered into my beloved Park Slope Food Coop, where I have been a member for over 15 years now, and I became irritated at a series of consecutive assaults on my senses. Those who know me are aware of how enthusiastically I expound on the Coop’s fantastic quality, prices and ideals. So I am sure I will be forgiven for grousing about 1) the silliness of having the blank classified ad forms and the bin where you deposit the filled out forms on opposite sides of the store (forcing me to navigate through a thick mass of humanity several times due to my unfamiliarity with the process) 2) new brands of baby spinach and field greens in hard plastic containers that are not recyclable and take up lots of landfill space 3) people who stand immediately behind me near the avocados and talk loudly into their cell phones, thereby creating the annoying sensation that a perfect stranger is speaking right into my ear. (I don’t care if she was eight months pregnant, as Billy pointed out.)
These three things happened within minutes of each other. It seems I simply cannot navigate the constant offensive barrage that has become modern life. Does anyone else feels this way? Am I the only one who walks out of a cell phone store because I simply cannot STAND the loud horrible mindless drone of corporate-created urban pop music?
Or am I just getting old?
(Although your post is old, I just found your blog . . . . ) Yes, a constant assault on the senses is one of the things that bugs me about living in NYC, one reason I have been abroad for the last few years. Yet the great stuff about NYC, including jazz, requires fine-tuning the senses, and this on the part of a mere nonmusician/participant. I miss the NYC music scene; alp horns and birdsong aren’t quite enough.
Visual assaults hurt, too, like the chewing-gum blogs on the sidewalks. (I walk a lot when I’m in NY, and you do have to look down in order to keep from stumbling in all the sidewalk cracks.) No geek here, just obsessive, and older, and yes, grumpy. Your reports from your 2009 Europe tour don’t sound grump at all, but, rather, joyful.