On postponing a thirty-minute bus ride for six weeks, becoming a tourist in a city I already knew, and discovering that proximity is one of romance’s natural enemies.

I am now waiting for PD! to send me the EOD file to send out to customers & internal stakeholders…..

While waiting, I will recap my month of November 2024-

Productivity is sometimes just procrastination with archival value.

The outing itself had begun in much the same way.

Every September, I remember that Manhattan has Christmas markets.

By mid-September, the thought had entered my head:

I should go this year.

This was followed by a series of increasingly sophisticated delays.

Christmas markets are prettier after dark.

They are also unpleasantly crowded closer to Christmas.

They open in October.

October was still warm.

The first weekend was inconvenient.

The second weekend somehow became inconvenient.

Then the third.

Then the fourth.

By the first weekend of November, I checked the weather and realized I had reached the final stage of seasonal procrastination: if I waited much longer, I would soon be complaining that it was too cold to attend the winter event I had spent six weeks postponing.

So I did something unusually decisive.

I got on the bus.

This was approximately thirty minutes of travel.

It had taken more than a month to arrange.

---

The problem was that I left too early.

A Christmas market, if one is being aesthetically responsible, should be visited after sunset, when the lights come on and ordinary wooden booths acquire the emotional authority of a European holiday film.

I arrived around noon.

The city was fully illuminated by the sun and therefore refusing to participate.

But I was already there.

This is one of the most useful travel principles I know: once you have physically arrived somewhere, curiosity becomes easier than retreat.

I had not been to ARTECHOUSE in a while, so I went there first.

By coincidence, the exhibition was marking the venue’s fifth anniversary.

There was a Pantone collaboration, immersive digital work, and a large amount of futuristic imagery drawing from Black culture and Afrofuturist aesthetics.

I stayed for nearly two hours.

Mostly sitting.

Occasionally reclining.

Essentially allowing very large images to happen to me.

It was the sort of exhibition that does not require tremendous effort from the viewer but still manages to rearrange the interior furniture of the brain.

The room shifted in color.

Figures moved across enormous digital surfaces.

Music and light did whatever they were designed to do.

I stared.

It was excellent.

Every so often I encounter a piece of art or design that reminds me how narrow ordinary life can become without announcing that it has narrowed.

Wake up.

Work.

Look at a monitor.

Answer things.

Move information from one place to another.

Eat.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Then someone projects an impossible future across a twenty-foot wall and suddenly your Tuesday spreadsheet seems less like reality and more like one extremely specific activity you happen to perform for money.

Museums are useful that way.

They interrupt the administrative hallucination.

---

Eventually I went to Chelsea Market for food.

I ordered budae-jjigae.

The photograph made it look like almost anything except budae-jjigae, but I was there and can confirm the allegation.

Afterward, I bought tanghulu.

I had tried making it at home several times and concluded that the process was fundamentally hostile.

Sugar had to reach the correct temperature.

Fruit had to cooperate.

Everything became sticky.

Cleanup required an emotional reserve I did not possess.

Commercial tanghulu, by contrast, required money.

This seemed superior.

It was extremely good.

It was also the sort of food that makes you aware, while eating it, that your pancreas has been informed.

Fortunately, I had already committed to walking around Manhattan for most of the day.

There are foods that feel decadent while sitting on a sofa and almost athletic when consumed between ten thousand steps.

I chose to believe this distinction was medically significant.

---

I briefly considered taking the subway somewhere else.

Then I realized that Chelsea itself was still entertaining me.

So I walked toward Little Island.

This is one of Manhattan’s stranger talents: it can place something conspicuously designed and expensive beside a river and, within several minutes, persuade you that nature has somehow returned.

Little Island had grasses.

Paths.

Water.

People wandering around with beverages.

It gave me, oddly, the feeling of a newly planned suburban development—one of those places where every bench has been discussed in a meeting.

I do not mean this as criticism.

There are worse things than a bench with institutional support.

What mattered was the river.

When I lived in Michigan, I had developed the habit of going near water whenever my mind became too loud.

Lake Michigan.

Lake Macatawa.

Saugatuck.

Anywhere there was enough water to make my immediate problems seem geographically smaller.

New York does not naturally encourage this kind of nervous-system regulation.

It prefers stimulation.

There is always another person, another horn, another train, another delivery bicycle attempting to occupy the same three feet of space as your body.

But then there is the Hudson.

You stand there for a while and the city gets demoted from entire universe to background.

Not peace, exactly.

Perhaps two tablespoons of peace.

Enough.

The grasses along the river had turned autumnal.

Reeds caught the late-afternoon light.

The sunset did what sunsets reliably do when given water to work with.

I stood there thinking, with the embarrassing sincerity that beautiful weather occasionally extracts from me, that this was the whole point.

Not of life.

Let us not become unreasonable.

Of leaving the house.

---

By then, it was finally dark enough for the Christmas market.

So I went.

There is a particular category of experience that becomes less miraculous the more accessible it becomes.

Years earlier, when I lived roughly four hours from Manhattan, going into the city felt like an event.

A friend once asked, “Unnie, do you want to go see the Christmas market?”

We got hot chocolate and walked around looking at the lights.

I remember feeling genuinely moved.

Manhattan had Christmas markets.

There were little booths.

There were lights.

There was hot chocolate.

People had apparently been enjoying this the entire time.

How extraordinary.

Now Manhattan was much closer.

I could get bored on a Saturday and simply go.

The major vendors came back every year.

I recognized some of the stalls.

I knew roughly where things would be.

Occasionally, the Christmas market itself had begun to seem repetitive.

This seemed ungrateful.

It was also inevitable.

Scarcity is an excellent publicist.

Distance made New York glamorous.

Proximity turned it into somewhere I could visit because I had nothing better planned.

The market had not changed much.

I had.

This is not necessarily sad.

There is something pleasant about a city becoming ordinary enough to use.

You stop approaching it as a monument and begin treating it as part of the neighborhood.

But familiarity requires occasional maintenance.

Otherwise, even Manhattan becomes furniture.

---

I walked around for a while.

Nothing dramatic happened.

I did not discover a secret restaurant.

I did not have a cinematic encounter with a stranger.

I did not become a significantly better person beneath the Christmas lights.

I looked at things.

I ate things.

I walked beside the river.

I watched art.

I spent enough time away from a computer to remember that the world contains surfaces larger than a monitor.

That was sufficient.

One of my recurring problems is believing that free time must either be used impressively or not used at all.

If I have only half a day, perhaps I should stay home.

If I have not made a plan, perhaps I should wait until I have one.

If I cannot see the Christmas market at exactly the correct hour, with exactly the correct weather, perhaps next weekend would be better.

And then next weekend develops its own objections.

Months disappear this way with remarkable professionalism.

The day in Manhattan was not carefully planned.

I had spent weeks avoiding it.

I arrived too early.

I improvised nearly everything.

It turned out fine.

Annoyingly, this is often how leaving the house works.

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Maybe PD has sent the file by now, so also ending my personal task here as well 🙂