I Checked In At W 32nd St and Awoke at W 207th St
I had rules. 1. Visit New York City every ’zero’ birthday year. 2. When travelling, go to local activities.
A Warm Welcome To You!
The Paradigm Shuffle was sparked after meeting diversified graphic designer Monica Marcil. It was October 2010 on the second night of my second visit to New York City and we were at the after party of an American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) talk about book design. From Montana, via Seattle, Monica was scratching an itch to make it in New York. It was an itch I wished I had scratched, though I had scratched similar itches in Hong Kong and London. We talked by the drinks and nibbles table where Monica was on duty, and after a while she presented me with the bespoke business card she had made for that evening. Kindly, Monica offered to show me some of her favourite places in the city.
I was there because of two rules I had set for myself.
1. That I visit New York every ’zero’ birthday year which for me coincides with every ‘zero’ year. The pandemic blew up this rule in 2020.
2. When visiting places I go to activities and events I’d go to if I lived there.
Far - 15,495 kilometres - from my neighbourhood, I’d flown in 26 hours before using a staff standby ticket thanks to my airline brother. My car brother could not help on this one. Unsure I’d get to travel on either flight, I had no hotel reserved. To travel standby is to accept a level of risk. Not recommended for mission critical journeys. But it works, mostly. Tickets are cheap. Choose quiet flights to increase your odds. Bumping is likely if there are delays. Be open to sitting ANYWHERE - back row, in front of the toilets, no seat recline. ‘Thank you so much, that’ll be lovely.’ Cultivate gratitude.
Cultivate Gratitude, Even In The Middle Seat.
Middle and windowless seats are common when travelling standby. Stay calm as you wait til the gate is closing to see if you are on the flight. And know that when you are invited to board one minute before the cabin is sealed, people will tut tut at your tardiness, and that you will shatter the glee or relief, or both, of the passenger who thought the seat beside them was vacant. Mount a charm offensive and give them a moment to adjust to their new constricted reality.
Be meditative if you miss out on a seat and must wait in a lounge until a later flight, or two, or the next day. Find a hotel. Ask ground desk staff for suggestions. They might know a cool place that does not leap out at you from a booking sites, which by that hour might only offer sad or expensive options. (For hotel nerds: this is how I found the cool Citadines Sydney Airport Hotel.)
It Will Be OK If You Decide It Will
Even when my original plans fall away, it will work out. I decide it will. And if the whole plan falls apart. I stay home, or if waiting for a cheap seat has become a false economy, I buy a full ticket.
Luck was with me, this time, arriving in NYC exactly when hoped. The AIGA event was my only firm booking. I risked the ten or so bucks for a ticket. The luck extended to catching up with old friends. One, a girl I grew up with, also on a zero birthday odyssey and, who had/has a thing for Gabriel Byrne - so I took her past Times Square to see this:
Then a couple of days later as we walked down a street, she pointed out a house. Gabriel’s house!!! She was not kidding. OMG. Was she planning to knock on his door or camp out? Thankfully, no. She’d already met him. But if she saw him walking by, well … who knows?!
And a boy I grew up with, was also in town with his family on vacation. We had drinks at The Standard and walked the High Line, the old railway line turned city garden, until I had to dash to a function. As if I were a local having to dash.
Don’t Spray Business Cards. (And Who Even Needs Them Now?)
After the talk about book covers and a retrospective of 70 years of Penguin Books came a signing. I got in line to meet the designers and American author A.M.Homes. Then I had choices - leave, stand alone, or network. I wrote about networking in the now-vanished business travel sections of newspapers. Tips: Don’t flit about the room spraying business cards to everyone. Converse at length one-to-one or in very small groups. This works for me, a one-on-one kind of person. Are you? Or do you thrive in a crowd?
A sharp intake of breath precedes any new conversation in that setting. Starting is hard but if I do, the other person is usually grateful I spoke first. I made two friends that night, Carolyn and Monica. Separately they became my best New York girfriends, each showing me their versions of NYC.
Mac ‘n’ Cheese Therapy
Former TV graphic designer Carolyn took me to a writers’ improvisation cabaret at Joe’s Pub, to the downtown Halloween Parade, and a Cuban restaurant in Hoboken. She told me about the Cooper Hewitt design museum and her friend Anne told me about a mac ’n’ cheese diner which I became obsessed about visiting, traipsing many blocks to reach on a wet November night. Carolyn also told me about the impact on her of the classes she took with the psychologist Albert Ellis, pioneer of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, precursor to cognitive behavioral therapy. Navigating office politics became easier for her.
Monica took me to favourite hangouts in East Village and SoHo. When I got home all the way to Australia she worked with me to design a new website. A cool site, sliding back and forth between business and creative writing with teaching somewhere in the middle. A truthful depiction of my life and work then. The font resembled a typewriter, a reference to how I started. The page featured my cacky (left-handed) backhanded handwriting in some headlines and sub-headings. It was a fun site even if unconventional as a call to action page.
Paradigm Shifts
As Monica and I spoke, The Paradigm Shuffle came up as a blog name, and it stayed in my head ever since. And yet I wasn’t sure. Paradigm is a chunky word, somewhat masculine to my ears. Is it the same for you?
Shift is the word we expect to hear after paradigm so I didn’t want that.
The ‘paradigm shift’ emerged as a scientific term. Simply defined it is ‘an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.’
I don’t know about you?
Yet.
But for me not every shift is big. They can be so gradual I don’t even realise until afterwards. So it’s a series of shuffles and small epiphanies rather than monumental change. I resist change, even if I really want the result that change will bring. Intentionally or not, we change one small thing, then another … The Paradigm Shuffle.
Reframe, pivot, reset
It’s easier this way. Who wants to be ripping off a bandaid every day? Though sometimes we must. Reframing is one of the most useful skills we can develop. Reframe, if the view east is not the one you need, turn to the northeast, or southeast, or swing to face the west. Be open to pivoting, like I was in NYC. Travelling on a standby ticket required a willingness to pivot with no notice. Pivot. A word I love in the dancer sense, now commandeered and hyped in corporate speak.
Sudden pivots have a downside.
Sudden pivots are not fertile ground for bargain hunters. (Athough a sunken cost now may reduce a big expense later!)
P.S. I always see at least two sides to everything.
I had to be in pivot mode in NYC. Flying standby, not certain I would even get to board any flight, I could not pre-book hotels at favourable rates. From one to night to the next I did not know where I would lay down my head. This is stressful for people who don’t like surprises, people wired to plan. Planning is not my strong suit unless it’s something I really want to do. I hate planning. I love having planned. Decisions challenge me, procrastination kicks in. Yet I travelled to NYC with no schedule. I winged it. So cool.
On the surface.
Hotel Roulette
Without bookings it was stressful. Whenever I felt settled in a hotel and happy with the deal, they would raise the rates. By a mozza. My planning failure meant I didn’t know I’d be in Manhattan on the New York Marathon weekend. Just as in 2000 I did not check to find out we would arrive in Italy at the same time as two million young pilgrims, specifically visiting Rome and Assisi too. Little wonder we only found affordable lodgings where Rome borders farmland.
Almost every day in NYC I had to move, or negotiate for my next night’s bed. Figuring out where I’d sleep and transferring my luggage pre-occupied my mornings. Would I move first or store my luggage until the evening? Time used up searching online when I might have been going places, having experiences. But I was having experiences, opening my eyes to other hotels, visiting other parts of the city. My decision-making muscle got a workout.
And so we come to the first night of my second visit to NYC.
Upon landing at JFK in the early evening on a flight from LAX, I bought a SIM card (remember them?) for a US cellphone network and found a hotel sales booth. An hour and a half later I checked in to the New York Radisson Martinique Hotel (for hotel nerds, now a Hilton Curio). It’s located right by the 33rd Street PATH terminal station. Not that I knew what a PATH train was. The Port Authority Trans-Hudson. Soon I would learn that many residents of Manhattan don’t know about PATH trains either. Though sometimes my accent played a part too in people not understanding me.
Across the street from my room at the Martinique a rooftop billboard proudly displayed an Apple iPad 1st generation. Wow, I’d made it. Here I was in NYC with the same new device tucked in my bag.
I needed a shower, meal and sleep in that order. But the first thing I did was to call a friend who lived in Manhattan, a newspaper colleague from when we both worked in London. Sheila Jones had left her news job in NYC to attend acting school which she had always wanted. I had never known. Now she was leaving town and returning to the UK. The removalists were due at her apartment next day. If we were to catch up, it had to be that night. ‘Where are you?’ we asked each other.
174 Streets Away
‘32nd Street,’ I said.
‘207th Street,’ said Sheila.
‘Ooh that’s quite far,’ I said. But then I got some perspective. What was 174 streets when I had already flown from Australia? Had I planned and phoned earlier I could have gone straight from JFK to Inwood. But no, I was a standby traveller.
By the time I took a quick shower in the plastic pod bathroom installed in my room, it was almost 9 pm. The two beds looked tempting. Which one would I choose? I had not seen one since crossing an ocean and a continent from Australia. Forgoing those beds and dinner, I walked to Penn Station. On the dim concourse, I teared up as I tried to work out how to use the ticket machine with unfamiliar currency, and then I had to find the A Train northbound platform.
The subway train rattled between some stops then sat in the dark tunnel for a time. Eventually the supervisor got on the loudspeaker to announce a ‘smoke situation’, confirming what my nose had already detected. In brief moments of reception, I texted Sheila with my location. On reaching 207th St, I disembarked onto a long platform with exits at both ends. Which to choose? Only one or two people exited at each end. I climbed the steps to emerge on a dark street with a city hum backing track. I was somewhere and without Sheila’s address. What to do? Then I head a voice, a male voice yell my name along the avenue. Not seeing him. I stood there stupidly tired until Sheila and her brother emerged a few moments later from the darkness.
Back at the apartment, Sheila made me dinner, boiling dry spaghetti, adding a jar of pesto. I felt at home.
Big Ben and Boris
Even before I arrived it was too late to return to my hotel home. Somehow I knew to bring my toothbrush. Assigned the couch, Sheila’s brother was across the room on a casual bed. ‘Is it OK if BBC Radio 4 is playing on the computer. I always sleep with that,’ he said.
’Oka-ay’ I said, certain I was going to fall into a deep slumber. Besides, I had spent 17 years in London listening to Radio 4 as my main station. Every hour through that night in the north of Manhattan, I heard Big Ben chiming the news in London and the booming voice of Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, the soon-to-be former British Prime Minister who was in the news that day. Maybe it was Boris, Big Ben or jetlag, or sleeping in a room with a person, kind as he was, that I did not know, that broke my rest that night. Still, it was worth it to see Sheila again. And staying in a home added a solid tick to Rule No. 2 of going where locals go.
After a tea and toast breakfast and a walk in the park at Inwood I called the Martinique to say, I wasn’t in my room but would be back soon, and to ask could I stay again that night.
'Yes Ma’am.’
‘Great.’ I said, not understanding then that rate would be US$100 more. And so began my hotel shuffle in NYC.
As I left Sheila and walked to catch the subway towards Midtown that morning I passed a school. It was break time and the children were playing on a street cordoned off with orange traffic cones, or let’s call them witches hats, as it was almost Halloween. Children playing on a road was many shuffles from the school yard of my childhood where we ran about on the grass and played spot the koala.
Here, 12 years on begins The Paradigm Shuffle and here ends this letter.
I really enjoyed this Marian! 😄 Great title as well. The two rules are a fabulous idea. This piece made me nostalgic for more trips to NYC. Thank you for sharing your travel experiences!
Great story…very well articulated