escuchela, la ciudad respirando...

No, no, no, I'm not going anywhere. But my mind has become a barren wasteland for the moment. Finals has taken the life out of me at the moment and I have been running around taking flights to see family for Mother's Day while trying to research PhD programs and look up thesis topics, make paintings and have a little thing called a personal life.  Have you ever just wanted to jump on a plane, head for a foreign country, change your name, change your identity...?!?? Well, maybe not the whole identity thing but I can dig the whole taking a pause from New York for awhile.

How can we conceptual "the city"? Do cities not exist in order to serve human needs, if so, the question of satisfactions becomes crucial. But satisfactions depend on aspirations, and aspirations depend on how a person perceives himself, his progress, and his status as compared with others. It seems likely that frustrations of desires for status, security, recognition, and self-expression contribute substantially to the hostility and violence found in contemporary cities. 

• They’re about waiting: for the bus, for the light to change, for your order of Chinese take-out to be ready. 
  
• They’re about the unavoidable physical and psychic proximity of other human beings competing for the same limited pool of resources and living space.  
• They’re about frustration: about parking tickets, dogshit, potholes and noisy neighbors. 

There are about concrete islands of overpriced real estate, shoddy urban planning, outdated and obsolete infrastructure. I believe that cities are all about difficulty and none so much as New York City.

“City life is millions of people being lonesome together”

~Henry David Thoreau