Sometimes Living in New York Is Like Taking Part In A Massive Art Installation

Amy J. makes me feel antediluvian.  Petite, nattily dressed, hysterically blond and strictly business, she’s come from college in Cincinnati to New York on a three-month internship at a Union Square design firm.  Somehow she manages to cover both ends of the spectrum of reactions I receive when I ask strangers to lunch; she’s at once the most delighted and the most scared.  But that’s the thing about Amy J.: she covers the ends of nearly every spectrum with which she engages.  I’ve never seen anyone spread themselves so thinly.  In Amy’s world, this is both the safest and most daring way to be.

“I’m kinda into everything,” she says in a voice that sounds like a machine gun shooting out rapid-fire piccolo notes, with shades of Joan Cusack.  “I don’t ever want to be one thing.  I never want to be branded in just one way.”  She speaks in tongues that way, peppers her speech with as many grown-up words (Networking, Holistic, Niche, Watchword, Product-Driven) as she does teenage ones, especially Awesome!, the exclamation mark evoked aloud at every utterance.  She is eager to please in an almost frantic way.

After living for two months in one of the vest-pocket rooms of a Canal Street art gallery, Amy has moved into a doorman apartment on Avenue B that she shares with three cute Southern boys, including a Goldman Sachs banker.  The rent is the same, but in this apartment, she can actually stand up straight in her bedroom without hitting the ceiling with her head.  “The other place had a bunch of French kids living there and a bunch of bad installation art, but it had no kitchen and you had to step over a homeless guy in the stairwell,” she reminisces.  My own rent in Brooklyn costs about a third less, but I get the discount available to New Yorkers who acquiesce to being unhip.  Were Amy and the French kids part of the installation? I wonder aloud.  “Maybe,” she says uncertainly.  “I thought that for a while.”  Either way, it was pretty cool.  “It’s like, I’m 21, I’m living in the city, everything’s a little craaazy!  No, it was cool!”