NEW YORKERS ON WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE A NEW YORKER: MORE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS, OVERHEARD BY AN IMAGINARY EAVESDROPPER

"I keep two kinds of files on other New Yorkers in my leisuretime. I keep an 'Interesting Persons' file, and I keep a 'Persons of Interest' file. The former group are the new acquaintances I meet here whom I want to invite to lunch. The latter group are the individuals I encounter here who are the most likely to murder me or rape me or kidnap me or physically torture me or injure me for life. I dread the latter group, who cause me to lose lots of sleep every night as I try to figure out which 'Person of Interest' from my list is my leading threat during that particular 24-hour period."

"My own 'Persons of Interest I've Met' file inside my efficiency apartment here in Manhattan has 10 times more names in it than my 'Interesting Persons I've Met' file. That imbalance worries me quite a bit. It seems to indicate that I am 10 times more likely to get murdered than to get kissed here in Manhattan. Maybe I should move to Manhattan, Kansas, in order to reverse the ratio in favor of my getting kissed."

"I have never heard of any campaign to make Manhattan, Kansas, a 'Sister City' of New York. I don't see what the point of it would be, unless I could get free tickets to the Kansas State varsity football games. Or is that University of Kansas varsity football games? I always get the university towns of Kansas mixed up."

"I'm surprised there isn't a New Yorkers Hall of Fame Museum, a museum shaped like a Big Red Apple, that each year exclusively honors the one or two former or current New York City residents, dead or alive, who are voted as worthy of being added to the exhibits in that museum. We have an NFL Hall of Fame Museum in Ohio, so why shouldn't we also have a Hall of Fame Museum for noble New Yorkers who aren't pro football players? But whoever gets chosen for that museum in any given year, thousands of local residents would organize a protest march alleging discrimination against their cited ethnic group, racial group, religious group, etc., for not being publicly honored in that particular year."

"I am pursuing a social psychology study on the bookmarks that New Yorkers purchase and then insert in their books when they are reading inside the public library here. My thesis is that New Yorkers subsconsciously select bookmarks they believe will help to motivate them to read all the way to the very last page. This study is based on the assumption that it is worth getting to the very last page, when I realize that a lot of books make their point early on and then just repeat it endlessly for hundreds of pages so that the last page is also an exercise in redundancy."

"I personally feel we have an urgent need for a new sociology study on New Yorkers who admit to being devil-worshippers. I sense that the percentage of New Yorkers fitting that dubious description has increased at least 20 percent in the last 10-year period. However, it is not clear how you go about identifying the devil-worshippers here in order to interview them for a field study. Maybe some researcher will place an ad in 'The Daily News', politely explaining that he is seeking to interview as many devil-worshippers as possible in order to make his findings on anti-religious trends here as authoritative as possible."

"Personally, I would be outraged if the federal government claimed that employers here are discriminating illegally based on religion if they refuse to hire an openly-acknowledged devil-worshipper. Devil Worshipping, to me, is tantamount to a confession about being a criminal; and employers of New York are fully justified when they refuse to hire a criminal!"
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"When they changed the name to John F. Kennedy International Airport, I personally worried it might put ideas in some airline pilots' heads. They knew that Kennedy had a Playboy steak in him, and that he reportedly had an affair with Marilyn Monroe. Maybe some of these pilots will attempt to follow the lead of JFK by attempting to go all the way, so to speak, with a glamorous female flight attendant while in the middle of a plane flight. That could lead to a disastrous outcome, if you ask me."

"Myself, I mourned the change of name from La Guardia International Airport. I liked knowing that he was one of the tiniest men in American history who was still being remembered. I'm five-foot-tall myself, so naturally I identified with Mayor La Guardia. Like him, I'm a man of stature who has virtually no height to my body. Whenever I search for a new bed for myself, I ask the store clerk what she has in the way of children's beds. She then nods her head knowingly, since she agrees that it's the only way I'll ever find a new bed to purchase that matches my size."