When you’re a single lady in in your early twenties and you live in New York and work in publishing, you sometimes feel so sorry for yourself that you burst into tears, spontaneously and without warning, in public. We’ve been there, and so we empathize with how annoying it is for Risa Chubinsky, a twentysomething subsidiary-rights manager at Simon & Schuster who lives in Park Slope, when she bursts into tears at a local bar — just like anyone in her situation would! — and finds herself upstaged by people who are even fatter, less talented, and incapable of financially supporting themselves than she is.
Risa writes in the Times:
If I am out drinking and sobbing about a bad breakup, I don’t want my cries to compete with those of an infant sitting next to me. If I go to the bathroom to correct my wayward mascara at the end of a long weekend night, I don’t want to watch a baby being wiped down on the soggy sink counter.
The thing is — and regular readers of Daily Intel know that we’re not particularly empathetic to blobs and the people who own them — there is a simple solution to Risa’s problem. The solution is to not live in Park Slope. Or at least to never go to bars there. I mean, it’s not like there’s a culture war. You’re in Park Slope. The babies have already won. They own that place. But what’s the big deal? Just walk a few blocks to the left or the right, the north or the south, and you’ll be the loudest crier in the room.
Baby Barflies [City Room/NYT]
