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

Small Acts of Love

A game of hockey going on on the river My boyfriend plays on a hockey team from September to May. It isn’t an official team—they don’t play games throughout the season and aren’t in any leagues—but they meet diligently every week for practice (he actually plays with two teams but it still isn’t clear to me what the difference is between them except that one team is better than the other). This requires some dedication because practices for both teams are either very late in the evening or very early in the morning. At the end of their season, before they take a break for the summer, the players come together and have a full-length game. I wanted to go last year and this year but wasn’t able to make it either time. Instead I asked him to send me a picture of himself in all of his gear. Last year he sent me a selfie of himself before the game, but without his gear on so I hoped this year he would manage to get a picture with both. He did not. I was willing to drop it, figur...

Working Identities

The halls of a TC building where I must be a doctoral student It’s been a while since my last post. To be honest, I haven’t done much besides school work, to the point that the I no longer know what to tell people when they ask me what my hobbies are. Which also means I feel a constant looming pressure of knowing I live in a big city with a reputation for never sleeping yet I spend my weekends holed up in my room or in the library (and the occasional coffee shop). This is not to say that I spend all of my time doing doctoral work. I have found two outlets in the form of jobs that have enriched this semester in ways that I didn’t expect. One is at a preschool, the other is working at the Graduate Writing Center consulting students working on academic writing projects. After not working for two years, I had forgotten what it feels like to be part of something that allows for change that you can actually see. Teaching is always rewarding as you watch children grow and marvel...

Finnish Differences

Time is a funny thing. It seems to move in leaps and bounds at times and at times it moves slower than molasses. Right now it's doing both. I can't believe it's only been a week and yet I can't believe it's already been a week. Sunset in Helsinki This week I've been in Helsinki for our Fulbright orientation. We learned a lot of information and it would be impossible for me to fit all of it into a reasonable amount of space so I will leave that summary for another day. But a week has given me some time to notice some differences in how things work in Finland and how they work in the US. I thought I would highlight five here that encompass a fair variety of my experiences so far. I have to give credit to my friend Marie who helped me with this list. Many of these are her ideas. 1. Nature is Everywhere This one is first because I think it is the most important one for Finns. Finnish people love nature and it shows in the way cities are built (at least th...