Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made Of

In Jay-Z's new song An Empire State of Mind featured artist Alicia Keys sings:

"In New York
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There's nothing you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new
The lights will inspire you."

Aside from ending a sentence in a preposition, Alicia Keys has some good points. New York does make one feel brand new, or at least like they're looking around them for the very first time. There are so many people and things to look at, to see, to do- the possibilities are endless. Everyone is interesting, busy, and stylish. But there's a lot that I couldn't do this weekend, even being in an empire state of mind.  While I have a lot of dreams and hopes, people apparently don't take a zest for life as a form of credit. (Lame.) So on Saturday, while visiting my twin in the new place she calls home, we ended up just walking around for a couple hours feeling equal parts inspired and poor. They seem to go hand-in-hand. Every time I started to sing the song Chel would stop me and call me a tourist. Scathingly. Only she was allowed to sing it, as she was a real New Yorker now. She paid rent. She rode the subways. She couldn't afford the produce. I was just a visitor. But I still felt inspired and sung it in my head. I'm sure I wasn't the only one.

On Saturday afternoon we stopped to listen to the buskers in Washington square: an a capella group singing mo-town, a piano player tinkling out Chopin, and a sand artist drawing mandala-inspired designs on the sidewalk. We took pictures of kids playing in empty fountains, walked to the river to see the skyline of Jersey (Jersey- beautiful at this time of year), but mostly we just walked.

A speaker came to my college during my freshman year as part of our orientation program. The whole lecture consisted of her passionately instructing us, the new students, to "stop doing" and to "just be." Ironic logic, if you think about the fact that my professors might not have looked too kindly on that reasoning as an excuse for having not done my research paper. "Sorry I didn't do my paper, Professor Halse. I was just being."

But on Saturday that's just what Chel and I did. We just be'd. (Saying "we just were" loses a little bit of the philosophical charm of the phrase.) However, to fulfill our youthful wild sides we did watch a few episodes of MTV's the Jersey Shore. Because you can't search the depths of the soul without spending time in the shallows, too. Yes, you can write that down.


The pictures are taken from my cell phone during our adventuring around town: the sunset over an apartment building, Buddhist inspired graffitti on a mailbox, and a painting on the side of a garage. Note: this last picture is most likely not the actual City of New York Bomb Squad logo. I doubt they'd endorse "Dr. Strange Love." (But maybe they should.)