The little things

Weekdays mornings when I walk to work, I'm generally not really happy. It could be that I'm not much of a morning person and I hate waking up at 5:25 each day. It could be that I hate the smell of Penn Station by the 1/9 subway, aptly described online as smelling of "Rotten sourdough bread and soured towels ... Rancid, biologicalish, garbagey ... Candy-store buttered popcorn ... Smell of a thousand rotting feet ... Ass ... Funky feet and Doritos ... Urine-soaked fish ... Fecal fiesta." (Sorry, I think that description is beyond fitting and should paint a fabulous mental picture for those of you who don't have the pleasure of sniffing Penn right after breakfast.)

Once I am finally outside, my sub-mile walk through Midtown to my office is cluttered with tourists stopping every ten seconds to take a photo on the street, people who like to type on their BlackBerrys while "walking", and an assortment of other people who don't "get" how to walk down a crowded sidewalk.

These little annoyances make it difficult to appreciate being in the City everyday. I hate winter; I hate the cold. I'm not a fan of the fact that people always seem angry in the City. But there is a part of me that will always love New York, having grown up here.

Today at about 10:00 a.m., in the midst of a perfectly clear blue sky (cold) day, one of my coworkers noted out the window that it was snowing. This was the first snow shower of the season, and we all gathered excitedly at the windows to watch. Although it was done no more than ten minutes later, I remembered that snow falling over Manhattan is a beautiful sight.

Another one of my coworkers walked to the side window, which no one ever looks out. It's buried perilously behind the copy machine, where no one dares to tread. He called me over there to point out something that none of us has ever really "noticed" - a magnificent head-on view of the Empire State Building.

These are the little things I fail to appreciate in my day-to-day life. These are the type of things I need to see the beauty in, when I get bogged down in the typical annoyances of working in the City.

"It was one of those days when it's a minute away from snowing and there's this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was, like, dancing with me. Like a little kid begging me to play with it. For fifteen minutes. And that's the day I knew there was this entire life behind things, and... this incredibly benevolent force, that wanted me to know there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video's a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember... and I need to remember... Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world I feel like I can't take it, like my heart's going to cave in." - "American Beauty"