Desensitized to the point where I can no longer put myself into their too-small shoes

This city is a hard place, and if your attitude doesn't match, I've learned the hard way that it's so much more difficult to live here.

So I've adapted, but in some cases, I'm not loving every aspect of the city person I've slowly become.

For example, there's this short, older, Chinese homeless woman we've dubbed "the art lady" who regularly comes into the coffee shop. (The reason she's the art lady is whenever she comes into the store, she always hands us a brochure of a new art exhibit opening at a museum, a new gallery opening, etc.)

Usually, she uses our restroom and sits harmlessly in our lobby for awhile before moving on in her too-small shoes which she said cost $600, but "suddenly" don't fit anymore because someone performed some voodoo on her.

But the other day, she annoyed the hell out of me. I ended up opening the store about 30 seconds late (on a Saturday, of course) simply because I wasn't ready to open it yet. But this was not before she started banging on the windows and looking at her watch before looking meaningfully at me. Strike one.

I gave her her usual large cup of hot water with a splash of coffee in it for free, but then she started pestering my colleagues and I for extra coffee, saying God would want it that way and was disappointed in us. Strike two.

Then she went and sat down and almost immediately fell asleep. Per the usual, I woke her up and told her not to sleep in the lobby. She told me she wasn't sleeping, but was meditating. Regardless - warning one.

After about 30 seconds of pretending she was going to stay awake, she fell asleep again and I woke her up and brushed off her protests of meditation, telling her if she wanted to meditate, she should go to the church right next door. Warning two.

Her falling asleep for the third time a few minutes later puts me at warning number three and strike number three, so I told her I was on my way to call the police and suggested she leave before they got there.

But of course, like the homeless almost always do, she started arguing with me, saying she has a right to meditate. But by that time I was more than fed up, so I literally told her that I'm not an idiot because I know the difference between sleeping and meditating, and I'm not going to let her stay if she's not going to respect my simple requests.

This is where she sees that I'm not backing down and admits to maybe dozing off, but says she'll stay awake. Hmm... where have I heard that before? And she almost pleadingly asks me if I'm really going to make her leave while it was still raining. At the time, I interrupted her to say something along the lines of "I am not arguing with you. You need to leave now."

After hemming and hawing and stalling for a ridiculous, yet impressive, amount of time, she tried to no avail to get my colleagues to let her stay - mostly because I told them to ignore her - and told me God was upset with me because she's His messenger, blah, blah, blah. Then she slowly trudged out into the rain in a raincoat carrying her two giant white snap-top bags that whenever she leaves them in the store unattended to use the restroom are accompanied by a cardboard sign that says "DO NOT TOUCH" three times.

Later on, when I was thinking of this episode and my interactions with Jack, our coffee shop's other regular homeless person, I realized with a start that living in this city has sucked out my compassion.

At first it scared me because I first thought I had lost all of my compassion. But after thinking about it some more, I realized that I do have compassion, but virtually none for the homeless.

I feel bad when I think of it in a broad sense - how horrible would it be if I didn't have a warm bed to sleep in, shelter in the rain, or money for food?

But here in New York City, you are nothing short of bombarded by these people on an every-few-minutes basis. If I gave a dollar to every homeless person who was begging for money on my 20-minute, mile-long walk to my internship, I'd easily be out at least $5. EVERY DAY. And that's on the days where I choose to avoid the corners where I know I'll come across the ones I've seen so often that I've named them "Winston," "Jesus," "Charlie," and "Ying Li."

It used to be tolerable, but when you're accosted for the same thing multiple times in just one walk, it moves beyond annoyance into simply indifference.

I can no longer put myself in their too-small shoes because I'm so desensitized to it that it doesn't even affect me anymore. I just put in my earbuds and pretend I don't notice them on the sidewalk. And in a broad sense, that bothers me.

However, when the tables are turned and I'm asking them for something - stay awake if you're going to occupy a seat in my coffee shop's too-small lobby - how many times do they give me that simple request? It's definitely not that often.

Put them together, and that's a really sad cycle.