Early rumors had the new Macintosh operating system, OS X 10.3, being released today. It would have been symbolic: 10.3, 10/3/2003. Get it?

But it wasn’t. It just went gold master a day or two ago, and it’s now expected to ship toward the end of this month.

I’m devastated, of course, as I expect any rational-thinking person to be. As a consolation prize, I am posting the second “State of Mind.” (Those who missed the first can scroll down.)

State of Mind
by David Buscher

When I first moved to New York City, someone told me that it takes nine months to really get acclimated to it. At the time, I thought he meant memorizing the subway routes (something I still haven’t managed), but the hardest thing turned out to be the people. They were rude, they were loud, and they were everywhere. More people lived within a block of my apartment than in my entire hometown, and there was no escaping them. I could hear them walking around upstairs, their televisions blaring downstairs, their dogs barking next door, and their car horns blasting on the street . . . all while I was trying to sleep. I dodged them on the sidewalks, waited in long lines of them at the store, and was shoved against them in the subways. I was always surrounded, never alone, and sometimes convinced that I was going mad.

Then nine months passed, and right on schedule, I loved it. The population seemed less like a noisy tide than an energetic current; the unimaginable number of inhabitants seemed less overwhelming than empowering. Imagine losing yourself in a crowd, besieged by millions of people and yet having utter privacy. That is the grand paradox of New York, where we discuss intimate details in crowded restaurants and shriek secrets into cell phones as we walk down the street, confident that no one will notice or care. With overpopulation comes anonymity.

And with anonymity comes freedom. Not only the freedom to be yourself, but the freedom to be more yourself than you ever have been before. In Baltimore, where I used to live, people are crazy but think they are perfectly normal (this is what gives John Waters so much fodder for his movies). In New York, people who are perfectly normal act crazy. Or rather, we behave the way the rest of the world secretly behaves in the privacy of their homes, but we do it in public. We talk to ourselves, display unusual eating habits, throw elaborate tantrums, dress in odd costumes, perform extraordinary rituals, and let our personality quirks run wild.

No one thinks this is unusual because we all do it: New Yorkers treat the entire city as if it is their own living room. We know that no one knows who we are or would dare call us to task. Usually, nobody pays any attention at all. In the midst of millions, we have the luxury of behaving as if we are completely alone and the courtesy to allow everyone else to do the same; the ensuing chaos is an etiquette nightmare and resembles a circus of mind-numbing proportions, but it amuses the tourists if no one else.

What it comes down to is this. When all you have is crowds, you can either get lost in them or stand out in them, marching to the beat of your own drum. It is the beat of so many different drummers that gives New York its energy, its power, and its unique rhythm.

That’s why I love it.