Living from moment to moment, I had no hotel reservation for that night. I figured luck would smile at me and I'd spend the night at some hot honey's place or something. So, I went to the hotel where I would stay the next night to put my baggage in storage.
Once that was done, I went to join Shoji (who I know through a grade-school friend) for supper along with some of his fellow English school classmates:
Shoji's classmates were interesting with diverse backgrounds and coming from all over the place: Germany, Spain, France, Korea... For some reason, they were all female. A couple of them made me wish they'd be the one to keep me from having to find a room at a hotel...After dinner, some of us went club hopping. One of the places we landed in is 230 Fifth. Apparently, it's quite the popular place these days. It does have a nice rooftop garden from which you can admire New York's skyline in all its splendor while sipping down cocktails and martinis.
At 4:30am, the party was over and I didn't have a place to stay. I walked a bit and saw this dude in a phone booth, pretending to be on a call so that he could take a piss there. I went to an Internet cafe to check my emails for a couple of hours (some people were sleeping there) and then went to my hotel, where thanks to my contact there, I was able to check in early and rest until a certain point in the afternoon. The rest of the day, I just did some light exploration.
New York felt different. I had always felt home there. But this time, the city made me feel lonely and it kept showing me things that reminded me of the girl with whom it didn't work in Vancouver. Maybe home isn't a specific place, but rather where your heart is.
The next day, I did some more walking in Manhattan before joining a German friend I had first met in New Zealand. She came to visit the US along with some other German girls. While I was sitting on some stairs, waiting for her in front of the Rockefeller building and thinking about life, a man came pretty close to me, stopped, aimed his SLR camera at me, slowly adjusted its settings and then took a shot of me. It was odd because I knew he was taking a shot of me and knew I knew he was taking a shot of me. Around the same time, a woman was scolding her boyfriend over her cellphone and telling him how much of a jerk he is. Love isn't easy.
The Germans finally arrived and we went to "The Top of the Rock" (the observatory at the top of the building in the middle of the Rockefeller Plaza). After that, we went to Inakaya, a Japanese izakaya restaurant located at 231 West 4oth. It's an animated place where the staff shouts all the time, the chefs hand out food with long tools so as not to have to leave their post and where the patrons are made to participate in the fun in such ways as beating the crap out of rice dough.
Once I came back to Montreal, I realized I had a voice message from Google's recruiter. I got very nervous. Even though I had tried not to set any expectations, I had let myself become convinced at some level that I would get the job. When the recruiter told me it wasn't the case, I was devastated.
Google isn't just a place where to work. It is THE place where to work. Getting the job would have vindicated me from destiny, in a sense. It would also have given me a place, I believe, where I would have belonged; a family of sorts.
In short, Google isn't just a job, it's a destiny.
Perhaps I'm putting too much faith in that company and am idealizing it as a sort of panacea to overcome my personal shortcomings, but I still feel that my life, despite not being bad at all, has fallen short of my dreams. The question now is what do I do with my existence?
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