Contemplation on "Making It"

Photos courtesy of ReDD

I am not from Cyprus, nor have I ever been there. But I do know a really nice guy who is from Cyprus, so there’s my claim to a guest posting on Stravara Mas. He’s a handsome guy, fabulous hair, sharp thinker and used to live in New York. He’s a guy that I often envy because he “made it” in a sense that he made it the hell out of this city.

When you move to New York everybody always tells you “If you make it in New York, you can make it anywhere”. That’s kind of stupid because nobody ever goes on to actually define what “making it” really means. Automatically we assume it must mean making a shit load of money on Wall Street or at least dating a guy who does. Or maybe its paying $5000/month for a cockroach infested studio in Manhattan while looking extremely hot, being rude to strangers and spending a ton of money you don’t actually have. Not sure, but either way… it sucks, because it sets you up for the notion that if you leave this bloody place without having done any of those things you leave feeling like you’ve failed, or like you just didn’t quite make it.

Well, whatever it means, we – the guy from Cyprus, Redd and I – we did none of those things here. I don’t know about the others, but I for my part got my purse set on fire on 23^rd Street; got flashed by a pervert in the 14^th Street subway station; undertook a 3 ½ hour hike in heels when the power went out; dodged two planes that made a rather large impact somewhere downtown; narrowly escaped an anthrax attack on my office building; nearly got trampled during a subway fire on Canal Street; got cheated out of 5 bucks by a guy pretending to be in a wheel chair; heckled by a life-size cross bearing Jesus freak; missed several opportunities for making some extra cash while riding the elevator with (now ex) Governor Spitzer; got called a skinny white bitch on the 77 Bus; fainted once on the F-train; met a guy who ended up pooping in my bed; caught my landlord going through my panty drawer and got myself in huge trouble with the Colombian Mafia.

I’m still standing though and even happily waving my arm. Yes, Redd (the one doing the lovely tree pose) and I are still standing albeit at the end of the world at the blasted Ikea waterfront in Red Hook on a Saturday night; wondering how the hell we ended up here and what our next move should be.

As for the Cypriot…. Well, we released him back to his homeland because he was the first to actually get it. He understood that he didn’t need New York and all the symbolism that comes with it to actually “make it”. So I say, to hell with “making it” and let us move on to more important things. Like "doing it", for example.