Thoughts on Yesterday’s Earthquake, and Why New Yorkers are Tougher Than Everyone Else

I don’t know about you, but I felt the earth move.  Har!

How about that? An earthquake.  In New York. That’s something new for all of us.

Now, I have another reason to be glad that I moved to the suburbs — namely, if we’re going to start having earthquakes in a big, dense city made up of buildings that were never built to withstand earthquakes, then I certainly feel that I made a pretty good trade.  Being able to get good ethnic food is wonderful and all, but not when the walls start trembling.

That said, I’m not particularly safe here in my condo in Nyack, on the eight floor of a building that I’m pretty sure what constructed on landfall.  A couple of good shakes, and I’ll be sleeping with the fishies.  That’s why I was a little freaked out yesterday, and encouraged my wife to get the heck out of the condo and take a walk or something.  I don’t even know that my insurance coverage protects me from earthquakes.  Probably something I should check.

It’s really monstrously unfair to subject New Yorkers to earthquakes, on top of everything else that they (sadly, that used to be “we”) have to deal with. I’ve always thought that New Yorkers are simply tougher than everyone else, by the sheer necessity of dealing with all the daily outrages and irritations that you have to put up with when you live in crowded, noisy city.

New Yorkers just deal.  Summers are too hot.  Winters are too cold.  You take a cab, you sit in traffic, you take the subway, you stand packed together next to someone who could easily be a serial killer. You live in a jail cell. Crazy people everywhere. Everyone in a rush, bumping into each other.  Snow, hail, sleet, hurricanes, blackouts — we get it all, and we just keep going to work.  Assholes dropped two fucking PLANES on our city, and we were all back at our desks two days later.  We DEAL.

No one else has to deal with all that stuff.  People who live in LA, for example, are like veal, sensitive and temperamental.  It’s so beautiful every day, they get freaked out with any change in their routine.  I’ve been in LA on rainy days, it’s like everyone’s afraid to be outside. They can’t drive.

So the fact that people in LA were sneering at our response to the earthquake was a little irritating. Yes, the idea of the buildings gave us a little pause.  Something new and surprising.  So people hurried out of the buildings, and some people got the rest of the day off.  But today?  Back to work.  Like always.