Let's All Act Like We're Angry Today!

The stereotype about New Yorkers (or, you know, one of them) is that we love to complain, although as is the case with most things in life that is pretty much true of everyone everywhere — have you ever heard of a place whose tourism slogan is “The City Where No One Complains”? — New Yorkers just tend to do it more loudly and frequently plus it has a wider audience because the news and a bunch of the culture are made here. Anyway, there are a couple of days each year where the complaints — which are indeed annoying, stereotypes or not — are actually a kind of community conspiracy in which we are all ostensibly whining about the same thing but are really not so much crabby as jubilant in a way that, being New Yorkers, we only know how to express in the medium of criticism. Today is one of those days. Everyone is going to pretend to be irritated about the fact that it has gotten slightly chilly again, when, deep down, we’re all super-excited about the arrival of nice weather (drop in temperature accounted for, it will still be 60 today, which, come on, you would have been wearing shorts in weeks ago) and stupidly optimistic that this time, when the seasons change, things will actually be better. They won’t — if you were able to fast-forward to August you’d find a town full of angry, aggravated people who reek of sweat, exhaustion and defeat — but this is that tiny window where we can all kid ourselves that they might. So let’s enjoy it while we can, because there’s nothing but suck coming up on the calendar. Also, good morning! Cold out there, huh?

Photo by needoptic