This is my second post for the day. Scroll down to read about my glamorous social life.

As promised, here is my last column. Although it is my favorite, it apparently did not get published after all. I am very sad about this.

State of Mind: Column Three
by David Buscher

In Manhattan, there’s one Golden Rule, and it ain’t pretty: you snooze, you lose. Losing in this city generally means waiting. The wait is often eternal for subway trains, tables in chic restaurants, and picking up your coffee at Starbucks. The worst thing of all is waiting in line for tickets. New York is a theatrical city. At any given moment, there are a thousand plays, movies, and special events going on. With our population of eight million, that means an average of 7,999 people have arrived before me and are waiting in line to get in.

A case in point was last Sunday, when I overslept by three hours. Not only did I miss my yoga class, I was also running late to see the Dalai Lama, who was speaking in Central Park at noon. My partner and I had planned to arrive early and eat a civilized and leisurely picnic lunch while we waited for His Holiness to take the stage. Instead, out of breath and clutching peanut butter sandwiches, we arrived at 11:55 to encounter the longest line in the history of the universe. It snaked around the park and uptown as far as the eye could see. We later found out that 65,000 people attended the speech. We went to the movies instead. We lost our chance for enlightenment, but at least the line was a little shorter.

We were luckier over the summer, when we sacrificed a great deal of snoozing in order to gain tickets to the annual outdoor Shakespeare performance in Central Park. Awakening at five o’clock in the morning, we stumbled down to the theater and spread our blanket on the sidewalk. We were third in line. By noon, there were hundreds of people behind us, and the scene had transformed into a typical New York bazaar, complete with circulating petitions, dramatic know-it-alls, and a flautist on roller skates playing the greatest hits of Celene Dion. And every few minutes, someone from the back of the line would wander forward and ask, “What time did yooze get here?”

“Five o’clock,” we’d say. You snooze, you lose, we’d think. We got second-row seats.

To be a New Yorker, it helps to be patient, but none of us are. We wait in long lines as a matter of course; if it occurs to us, we even bring along items to distract ourselves. We have our books and newspapers and cell phones and CD players. In line for the Shakespeare play, I had my laptop computer, three books, a magazine, and two grocery bags full of snacks. But we are always hyper-aware of our surroundings, counting the moments until the tickets are distributed, and making sure no one cuts ahead of us in the queue.

Actually, New York lines tend to be very fair and democratic places because we aren’t afraid to stand up for ourselves. Rather like the old Soviet bread lines, except we’re waiting for something that’s actually important. You know, theater tickets.