The City of Roommates
By Claire Cordonnier “When you’re young, you don’t need much to survive,” a hair stylist told me recently when I was getting my hair done somewhere near 60th street. That’s right, if you keep your necessities cheap and uncomfortable, there’s more money to spend on frivolous things like hair treatments and overpriced clothing. As you get older, your physical needs become more demanding and uncomfortable things become even more so. New York is full of discomforts, and these can’t be tolerated as easily by the old as by the young. The things that make roommates annoying are the same things that make the city annoying. And aren’t roommates more so a “young people” thing? One can’t get too far away from their fellow New Yorkers; we’re all siblings in a way. We all live close enough together to observe and be annoyed by each other’s dirty habits. We’re all constantly in one another’s way: blocking the sidewalks with our slow walking, hampering the stairwells with our meandering st...
