Skip to main content

Sounds of New York City


To me New York City is associated with a constant barrage of sounds. My heater makes a racket at least once an hour for ten minutes while it spews and spits steam to warm my room enough that I have the window open even in January. When the heater isn’t making a racket, my fridge is buzzing and thrumming.

This is not to mention the sounds that come from outside. Sirens are a constant (though blessedly not between 10pm-7am for some reason). And loudest are the garbage men who come twice a day (some times) and bring with them sounds of yelling, the whirring of the truck and banging that all carry to my ninth floor room. They can come any time between 7 or 8 in the morning and often spur me to go work out earlier than I might have to get away from the noise.

At night, between my heater and fridge there is constant noise while I sleep. One night when I lay awake in my bed, I suddenly realized that the room was completely quiet. No sounds coming from outside, no heater spitting and no fridge thrumming. I ran away to Finland over break chasing this very silence (admittedly, New York cannot compete with Finland for silence) but when my room was so quiet my only thought was “What if the heater’s broken?”.

Sometime this past week though, I noticed a different sound in my room. A sound that seemed to be coming from my kitchen and could only be described as scratching. Yet during the day I could never hear the sound and when I checked my cabinets at night there was nothing unusual. So my worrying mind jumped to termites: I imagined termites burrowing deep in the wood and having my cabinet bottom collapse one day becasue of their tunneling. When I ran this theory by my parents my mother immediately said it wasn’t possible.

Just as I was starting to think that perhaps I needed to have someone look into what the cause was, I heard the sound again, but this time it sounded like the rustling of a bag. There’s only one cabinet that contains bags so I went straight to it and opened it with more than a little trepidation. As much as I wanted to know what it was, I was scared of what I would find (my worst fear was be finding something dead, or that flew in my face).

Confirming that the sound was indeed coming from the cabinet, I decided to search my room for stick to rustle the bag. Unsuccessful, I went back to the cabinet and at that precise moment, I saw the source of the rustling and scratching.

A mouse. A cute, adorable, tiny mouse. And so I screamed and promptly shut the cabinet door.
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Policy, Privilege and Pudding

Temptation incarnate I have now told myself that I really need to cut down on my sugar habit at least five times since coming to Berkeley. To be clear, this only counts the times I have said this with the serious will power to try changing my eating habits. There are numerous other times when I have thought I ought to change my eating whilst eating a cookie or buying the fourth ice cream in the past five days. My poor fellow has had to deal with listening to me say on every one of these occasions that this time will be different or listen to me dwell excessively on how the day went in terms of eating sugar for the entire time. He’s been a good sport about it and doesn’t judge me for my inability to stay away. I am about to start on my sixth endeavor. This time, I have set a time frame and I am planning on sticking to it. Even though it makes the hours seem so much longer as I continuously talk myself out of eating the chocolate pudding temptingly sitting in the fridge....

Walls, Bridges and Norway

A view from under the bridge in Turku The past few days have been rather snowy in Turku. The roads are covered in a packed layer of snow, with ice patches camouflaged under the white. While walking to class today, I saw a guy descending from the hill to the footpath under the bridge. He took a step onto the sidewalk and jolted back with his arms flailing out. This all occurred in the matter of seconds. He quickly regained his balance and kept walking as though nothing had happened. I’ve seen so many people nearly slip, the same way this young man did. Most casually keep walking, sometimes they share a laugh with their companions if they are walking with others. A few actually fall to the ground, get back up, and continue on. I’ve done both on many occasions. But today it struck me that this sight is very endearing. The word cute also came to mind to describe it. And then I realized how terrible both thoughts sounded, even in my head. I had to reflect about it ...

Holding Sand

 My mother once gave me the sound advice to avoid holding tightly onto things (she was specifically talking about people at the time) because if you do, they have a habit of slipping away. She did this through a marvelous metaphor that went like this: If you have sand in your hand and make a fist, the sand begins to fall out and you are left with less sand than you started with. If you gently cup you hand and let the sand come in however, it remains in your hand, and you can perhaps even add more. This metaphor has stuck with me because it helped me with the problem that I was having back then. But I’ve come back to it again and again and slowly been realizing the smaller and more subtle ways that I grab onto things. These things are now always visible or tangible, but they still have important implications. Take meditation. I meditate every day. It’s like brushing my teeth, I simply can’t skip this part of my day. But unlike brushing my teeth, which is a methodical and easy ...