I feel like I’ve been

I feel like I’ve been floating along for the past couple of weeks, buoyed by business and eating competitions and birthday parties and such. Now things are calming down again and it’s like every time I exhale I get a little bit closer to the ground. A return to normalcy is always a little bit welcomed and a little bit depressing. That’s not to say that there isn’t another big birthday party on Friday, or that Jennie isn’t staying with us, roommate style, while she starts her new job and apartment hunts, or that some friends’ relationships aren’t in crisis, or that a good friend isn’t this close to landing a huge new job with a shiny new paycheck attached. All these things are continuing. I can just begin to wrap my head around them again.

The other afternoon, while I was the only one in the office, an older woman wandered in looking for a knitting store. Our office is in a building with a doorman, and would be very difficult to mistake for a knitting store, or any store for that matter. I thought perhaps she had the wrong address, but then she gave me the name of our company and mentioned knitting again. I can’t really emphasize enough how little we are a knitting store. I told her I didn’t know what to tell her, but we really didn’t have any bulk yarn or even deal with anything knitting-related. At all. She was visiting New York and looked so crestfallen and lost, that I offered to look up some knitting stores in the area. I came up with several and gave her a list with their addresses and cross streets and phone numbers. She was grateful, but not overly so, and I thought she might not realize the oddity of the whole situation until she got home and relayed it to her daughter, at whose apartment she was staying.

A couple weeks ago, two kids were messing around at the turnstiles at our subway stop as J and I were trying to swipe through. They heard the train approaching and one of them sprang over the turnstile, and the other gave up on a card he was sliding through and slid under. I wondered aloud to J whether MTA workers have any methods for stopping people who hop the turnstiles, or whether they’re pretty helpless behind the plexiglass. We were right behind the kids, and as they bound down the stairs, the one who had been trying to swipe a card dropped a couple bucks. The train was coming and they were running, so we didn’t try very hard to give the money back. J swooped it into his pocket and I mumbled something about instant karma. (The money later went in a tip jar at a coffee shop.)

It seems like I should feel good about helping the old woman, or bad about not trying to return dropped money, but I feel exactly the same about both situations. It’s just sort of a neutral irritation, something out of the ordinary that was supposed to test me in some way, happening against the normalcy of everyday life. It’s not that I mind helping or taking the ethical high ground, or even rationalizing my way around doing something unprincipled in certain situations. But maybe it’s that I don’t like the feeling of being tested, or of having the obligation of feeling good or bad when I don’t feel either.

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