Hey blog fans! I’m sure most of you are used to my, um, sporadic blogging schedule, so it will come as no surprise to anyone that I haven’t updated in a month. To those that it does surprise, hey, have we met?
Anyway, do y’all remember when there was an earthquake here in NYC yesterday? I mean, seriously, I do consider myself somewhat of an expert now. I mean, to be fair, I slept through my very first earthquake. I was pretty upset when I woke up in Coventry that morning to realize that everyone else in the company had felt it, but I had totally missed it. At that time, I was like, whoa 5.2, that is some serious earth quaking. I fully believe that God in his heaven was like, heh, heh, heh, can’t wait for future Susan to see what I am capable of. Oh, hey 9.0 earthquake while I’m in Tokyo with a company of 50 (100 if you add the children’s chorus we picked up in Tokyo), yes, you have made your point, and I can see that 9.0 rocks way harder than 5.2. Oh, also, I would like to concede complete victory to nature after experiencing the 250 odd aftershocks in the five days following March 11. You totally win, nature. We humans are just along for the ride.
So, this is why yesterday while we were sitting at our desks and the building started swaying, I got an all too familiar feeling in my stomach. Confusion ensued though because I work in Times Square and not Hollywood. Yes, I realize that all you Californians laugh at our East Coast freak out to some 5.8 earthquake felt here in NYC because you guys are the kings of earthquakes, but I also feel that if all of a sudden we moved the sprawl of Los Angeles into a 1 mile radius and called it Times Square at rush hour and had to read all your Facebook postings of how f’ing hard it is to walk to work when tourists can’t seem to stop the practice of stopping eight-across and twelve-deep on the corner of 49th and 7th to read what’s on the TKTS board (hint: it’s NOT Book of Mormon) , then we’d have an equal opportunity to roll our eyes.
But, I digress. In any case, I felt the why-is-this-feeling-so-familiar-to-me swaying of 321 W. 44th St. and my heart raced into warp speed. Thanks to my former ROA pal who reminded me that all was okay since I was at home and everyone was speaking English! Quite a change from March. But I must admit that after Facebook confirmed that it was in fact an earthquake (like true New Yorkers, we tried to log onto ny1.com, but sadly, it was jammed. I totally needed my news from Pat Kiernan, my NY1 hero, who is on vacation, sadness!), I must say, I felt a very strange sense of “wait, how many of these did I go through in those few short days in Tokyo. How on earth did we survive that??” I mean, I immediately had to text my Joseph… ACM to say, “did you feel that.” Which was the phrase repeated most often in those days after the Tokyo earthquakes, as you were never quite sure if you were going crazy, or if the hotel / train / ground / Starbucks was, in fact, still moving.
We all eventually returned to our desks to laugh at everyone’s first “everyone’s ok” postings transform into super snarky and jaded updates for the next hour our so (or if you’re the producer of my show, the next three minutes upon which we promptly returned to our accounting and marketing duties), then people would just mention throughout the day, “hey, remember when we had that earthquake?”
Anyway, what a random New York event. I wonder if people will remember it like the blackout or the transit strike. Both of which were total ridiculous experiences to go through, but, as they tend to do, united us all as New Yorkers bonding over how f’ing long it took to get home that day…
Witty Girl in the City 