Model Baby Sitter

Three terriers splayed on fine cashmere throws, a fridge satiated with organic health foods, and flat screen televisions appropriately placed on pristine eggshell walls, surround sound systems in tow.

The apartment whose bay windows overlook the trendiest neighborhood in Manhattan is replete with all the amenities one would need to live more than comfortably in the city, and as the light flushes through the space, it taunts me. Highlighting expensive art, framed pictures of vacations spent at second homes in Caribbean islands, and collections of designer frocks hanging from walk in closets.

This life that I am merely borrowing for the two days I have been paid to baby sit a model’s furry friends innocuously seduces with its “finer things”, and forces me to think about what could be in the city that I have chosen to call home.

New York entices its potential residents through sex and the city-esque paradigms. The nightlife, the restaurants, and the culture palpitate in the concrete jungle. To find the pulse of the city is what most desire to accomplish. Where is the bar of the moment? Who is the next mysterious artist to have an opening? What fashion trends are the Williamsburg hipster kids and models off duty struggling to covet in the months to come?

New York is a city that forces people to choose. Are you a fashionista? Socialite? Intellectual? A niche is required to maintain a foothold on the island.

A magnetic energy leads many to develop an identity after they become acclimated with the requisite that one must have a “something” to not be become invisible. So to be a floater, one who is still unsure of what road they are to travel, is living in a perpetual limbo, a real purgatory. Feeling as if everyone around them has it all figured out.

While the city moves at a pace no slower than childhood cartoons like speedy Gonzales and the road runner, those still struggling to figure it out are subject to constantly feeling on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Anxiety ridden, the floaters try on the plaid and dirty skin tight denim to see how it would feel to be the hipster kid. Buy a set of horse hair brushes and haphazardly stroke acrylics onto stretched canvas becoming the artist, and succumb to buying the shoes that cost half a months rent to effortlessly appear to belong in front of the line at Beatrice.

The impetus to belong to one tribe compels twenty and thirty something year olds to conform to standards not so blatantly present in other urban cities. And yet, you can always spot us, the floaters, exciting a new identity weekly, monthly, and even daily. Testing out what skin fits. Plaid, paint, purses, poems, the flavor of the week will continue to be mercurial. One day we will either come to terms with the fact that we cannot be defined by one genre or attribute, or we select one and work towards perfecting it, so as to be convincing enough to no longer be evaporating into the humid air of the New York summer. Rather remaining solid and visible in a population so often defined by its tendency to swallow its residents whole.