sandy: a sing-along blog

Friends, here is a guide to living on the frontline of the end of the world.

Play: "Fistful of Love" by Antony and the Johnsons

Step 1: Wake up feeling a little bit like it's Christmas. No work, no obligations, and a rising giddiness in your ribcage.
Jump on your roommate's bed and plot heroic evacuation strategies. (Wonder if two writing majors have what it takes to execute said strategies.)

Play: "She Wolf"by David Guetta feat. Sia

Step 2: Suit up and brave the roaring breeze and wailing drizzle like a boss. Make your way through four whole blocks of mild discomfort to pick up the essentials.

Play: "Trapeze Swinger" by Iron & Wine

Step 3: Once safely home, brew a pot of tea and bust out your Iron & Wine vinyl (double hipster cred). Spend some time reading, writing, and discussing philosophy. "It's like everything has already happened. That's why we live in a world of memes and hashtags." #firstworldproblems

Play: "Help I'm Alive" by Metric

Step 4: Get cabin(/angst) fever and suit up again. This time with velcro hightops, because you mean business. As you walk through kids playing football on the sidewalk and old rain slickered men with smiling eyes, feel, as you do whenever a whole town goes slo-mo, that you are part of something extraordinary.

Step 5: Take a picture of your feet.

Step 6: See yellow-black plastic hanging wimpily across the park entrance. Hop it. (If they were serious, they would have at least double wrapped the place.) Join the slow procession of urban pilgrims moving wordlessly to the Hudson. Feel that thing again, times seven.

Take in the tipping waters, poised to spill, and ragdoll boats. 

Play: "Hide and Seek" by Imogen Heap

Step 7: Contemplate the sheer beauty of objects flying around, a la American Beauty. Stand on the edge of chaos and feel the wind actually try to pick you up. Instinctively look for something to grip and picture yourself, like a Titanic extra, hanging from a metal railing. Relish the idea with 94% gratitude for its impossibility and 6% longing.

Feel that you finally understand the lyrics "...when busy streets a mess with people would stop to hold their heads heavy." 

Feel sorry for every human who has not had the chance to play this song on top volume in the middle of a storm.

Notice the man with the green umbrella sharing your square of Sandy and give him a nod. He's probably thinking what you're thinking. He's probably thinking something cooler.

Step 8: Busted.

See the po-po rolling in to shoo us vagrants to higher ground.

Play: "Runaway" by Kanye West

(Fail to see the irony until you sit down to blog about it.)

Feel a fleeting solidarity with everyone in the world who has ever been shut down by the man.

...Remember that you are a middle-class white girl.

Trudge back over lame police lines with the rebellious (but not actually rebellious) masses.

Play: "Hurricane" by Something Corporate, which has come up on shuffle as an act of God or Ashton Kutcher

Step 9: Walk home laughing.