How To Look And Feel Like a New Yorker And Not A Tourist: Special Hurricane Edition

On Preparing For A Hurricane

[Author’s note: I wrote this blog a few weeks ago during the Hurricane Irene, but have only just now edited and posted it. Hope you enjoy.]

Let’s take a look at how a true New Yorker prepares for a hurricane. For most of us city dwellers, the biggest concern this weekend is not necessarily combating the elements, but boredom. In preparation for the storm, Mayor Bloomberg has implored us not to leave the safety of our apartments for the better part of two full days as Irene is projected to barrel through the city. An unrelated but recent study* found that on average, a New Yorker spends no more than four consecutive hours in his or her apartment, including time spent sleeping. And on weekends, the number of consecutive hours is nearly cut in half. You see, we have new restaurants to try. We have bars to frequent. We have live music to hear. We have people to dance with, new clothes to show off, acquaintances to keep up, and late night falafel to eat. Stay in? For the whole weekend? I’m afraid, for this weekend at least, it’s so.

In response to the impending boredom, I have devised a little Hurricane Survival Guide for the New Yorker combating cabin fever. Here is what you will need:

1. Patience. The line to get into the Trader Joe’s grocery store to stock up on food items to outlast the hurricane is second only to the line to get into the Trader Joe’s wine store to stock up on, well, wine to outlast the hurricane.

2. Duct Tape. For reinforcing glass windows to prevent shattering. Also for writing in giant block lettering, “WE ARE OPEN” on the plywood boards used to protect the windows of the Project Parlor, the neighborhood bar.

3. A Plan B. The Duane Reade pharmacy has run low, as you might expect, on many staple items such as tortilla chips. Apparently, during hurricanes, New Yorkers do exactly the same thing they do when it is not hurricaning: drink and eat tortilla chips. Have a plan B grocery store in mind to make sure you get your chips for the weekend.

4. Creative Outlet. Use your iPhone to take pictures of all the neat pre-hurricane cloud formations. Use Instagram or some similarly clever iPhone app to enhance the contrast of the photos to make the cloud formations even more neat. Upload the photos to your various blogs and twitter sites and/or txt them to friends and family across the country to maintain some semblance of contact with the outside world.

5. Multi-tab web browsing. In addition to the normal non-hurricane barrage of gmail.com, facebook.com, nytimes.com, and npr.org, add weather.com’s Hurricane Tracker to your multitab browsing to continually refresh Irene’s path and each time comment to your roommates about how you never realized how slow hurricanes were.

6. A gchat status message, about the hurricane. The gchat status is, we must all admit, conversation bait. We’ve all been there: wanting a conversation with someone but not wanting to appear desperate and socially deprived. And so we write a moderately witty, controversial, inspirational, or slightly confusing gchat status, and watch the conversations pour in. Same principles apply during hurricanes. Try writing something like “Here it comes!” or “Battening down the hatches!” or even, “Windy.”

7. Arrested Development Seasons 1-3 on DVD.


*This study is a fiction.