KALEIDOSCOPE LIVING

I became an insomniac when I realized that working third shift as a proofreader gets you more money than any other time of day  and working the weekend third shift gets you even more money than that. I'm all for any working situation that's going to pay me as much as possible within a certain block of time. Getting into it was logical enough.  I love words, I love to write and I already knew and understood the basic symbols.  Proofreading was straightforward. Temp work was uncomplicated. With most of my daytime hours free, I could use the best of my creative energy to work hard on what brought  me to NYC in the first place instead of giving it to a meaningless corporate job that paid me less than I was worth.

Proofreading is solitary work, for the most part. Its actually quite lovely. I usually work by request only.  There's no one breathing down my neck because they think that's  what they're supposed to do if they're my boss. Everyone gets out of my way because, well, that's the way you're treated when you're a temp. Once  I'm given a quiet area to work in, I put my headphones on and I'm on my way, examining stacks upon reams upon piles of documents with a red pencil, a well-lit magnifier and a fine tooth comb.  The next thing I know, ten hours have gone by, the sun is coming up and I'm staggering out the door, more wide awake than ever.  Work has dried up considerably since 9/11.  Everyone is doing the tighten up. The temp doesn't get called in unless work has piled up and there's a massive deadline.  If this keeps up, I may have to consider other options.  Leaving town isn't one of them.

Thanks to years of having to do this for a living, I'm awake at night whether I'm proofreading or not.  So I do other things. Like bowling.  That's one of the reasons why I love NYC so much:  I can do pretty much anything I want, at any hour.  I can even play guitar in the dead of night and no one complains.  (Not yet anyway.)  Living here is like being trapped inside a gigantic kaleidoscope. Pretty colors in different patterns, swirling around you all the time. Everything is familiar but somehow you never see the same thing twice.  Problem is, you can't turn the pretty colors off.   That's why sometimes you have to get out of here, get away from the city, from everything that is anything like the city.  Turn the color set off, watch some black and white tv for a change.  Everything isn't meant to be colorized.  Some movies are better in black and white because they were made to be seen that way.  After awhile, you miss the city.  You realize that you've never seen such colors anywhere else.
 
Even when you leave and have fun, any other colorful place is not enough eventually.  So you come back.  Feeling that need to come back  is when you know that you love NYC, that you are a New Yorker on some level.  If the feeling ever leaves you, there's plenty of residue all over who you are that lets anyone know that you've spent time there.  Like the way you can list off your favorite Indian restaurants.  Or how you know your old neighborhood so well.

Some people live colorful lives no matter where they are. Some people live in NYC, in black and white. But this is the only place in the world where you can get a  kaleidoscope that's big enough to live in, if you want.