We’ve finally made it to Spring (the weather seems to still be catching up). We’ve also been having lots of rain (April showers bring May flowers and all that). Yet I noticed something interesting on my walk home from school. As I pass Park Avenue and 23rd st., there is a little park/mall thing with beautiful greenery and flowers. I also noticed something exceedingly stupid: the beautiful flowers are tulips. Don’t get me wrong, tulips are absolutely beautiful and bloom in an array of shades. But something interesting about tulips: they last about a week (2 weeks at most if you’re lucky). I do understand, because my mom worries about the colors in November, that they can be planted early in the season  and that the city won’t have to worry about what’s going to be in April. But if the aim is to create something beautiful, why put in a plant that will disappear after a week and leave bare stems? Perhaps I should just be grateful for the tulips on 23rd, at least they’re planting something.

A couple of semesters ago I was charged with the task of deciding on a definition of “home.” I more than likely gave some generic response about home being where the heart is. After the semester was over, I filed the project away deep in my brain, but I do still think about it from time to time. As is common with NYC, there are plenty of homeless people that I pass on my route (another problem for a later discussion, though). The assignment I had got me thinking a little bit more about this and the aforementioned cliché. Many choose not to abandon the city streets as they have become their home and the place they love. In a sense, they are without a house, but the city remains their home.

This is the lovely view I wake up to in the morning (this is NY, so it could be much worse). This view seems pretty average, no? Something, though, about it is quite interesting. Those two compost bins for food scraps and yard waste have not been moved in several weeks. The bins sit there as the weather changes and as the garbage men pass by without giving them a second glance. I don’t blame them. Hardly anyone I know uses these bins. Sometimes they’re used by the kids as a makeshift basketball hoop-type of thing. Supposedly this initiative, which is part of Mayor de Blasio’s “Zero Waste” plan, distributed these brown bins for 3.5 million residents across the five boroughs. I have seen them placed in garbage bags and thrown away. In theory, and theory is the key word here, composting is a fantastic idea. There is tons of organic matter that can be turned into energy to create a more sustainable New York. However, the current methods have hardly gained any traction and probably just cost the city several thousands of dollars (the actual program cost 15.7 million to implement. Yay budgeting!) to produce waste bins that are being tossed into the trash.

Disclaimer: I did not take this photo at midnight as I would not take the train at such an hour (but that’s a discussion for a later post).

I watched the sky from twilight until dark while waiting on the platform for the Manhattan-bound F Train. I waited while the sun was up, I waited while the sun was going down, and I waited until the moon shone. While sunsets are beautiful and all, a freezing, windy train platform is not my preferred setting to watch them. The transit app claimed that the service was “good” and that the train should be arriving in 5 minutes. Perhaps there was a glitch in the system that caused the “4” before the five to disappear from my screen. My friend asked where I was, so with frozen fingers, I took a photo of the empty platform I was on. Fear not! The Coney-Island bound trains were running (although only to the next stop, where they were promptly stopped). As a New Yorker, I must say I love the train service, but the train’s service is, like the streets of the city, garbage.