This seemed to be the most favorite line for any cashier or food place worker. Not "How can I help you" but rather "What do you want?"...I should respond by saying "just wanted to say hello." Don't get me wrong though, other than that, the city was awesome and New Yorkers are just fine people. I must admit unexpectedly but I really enjoyed New York City and New York in general.
I arrived in NYC saturday evening June 11. I got to stay with one of my best friends for 3 days, Colt and his wife Vanessa and what a blessing it was to get to enjoy NYC with people I love to be around. The first night, Colt and I did what most 20 something year old men would do on a saturday night roaming downtown NYC and Times Square......we went to one of the best Toys R' Us's in the country! That's right, after spending some time looking for this secret hamburger place obscurely tucked away behind a curtain, yes a curtain, at some fancy hotel we did not intend to spend time in a toy store, but the lights, oh the lights how they lit up and the inside of the store had a farris wheel with all of your favorite cartoon characters....we just couldn't turn our backs on such an attractive store. Even more, they had these ultimate lego structure built inside like that of the empire state building, the eiffel tower, etc. It was cool, real cool.
*Footnote* Read previous paragraph with humor, no I do not get this excited over toy stores....or do I?
Real Talent
After church, I did a lot of touristy stuff and sight seeing w/ Colt & Vanessa, seeing ground zero, walking halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge and later in the evening I felt as though I became a little bit more sophisticated after watching the Tony Awards. These people who perform live on stage and on Broadway, now they are the real deal. They don't get the kind of recognition Hollywood stars do yet they are far more talented. This has now sparked what I think will be a permanent interest for me in plays and dare I say, musicals maybe. Vanessa and her sister Jennifer personally know the guy who won an award for best performance of the year.
A New Nemesis: The Hipsters
Many of you who know me, know of my former dislike for hippies. But in recent years, the hippies and I have been able to make peace and find some common ground on many things. Another group has emerged in the 21st century and they are by far worse than the hippies of yesteryear. I didn't have a name for this group and I didn't know how to describe them exactly except that they don't care about anything, not politics, the world or any kind of spirituality (at least the hippies, strange as they may be, care about stuff) wearing thick dark glasses, shaven heads (girls darken their hair), the males wear bigger earrings than most girls, tattooed to no end, and wear extremely tight jeans. In conversation I learned that this new annoying group are called ....The Hipsters. They are rampant in places like NYC and Richmond and they are far worse than anything we've ever seen before. I shall raise the fires Valhalla against them.
Yanks & Broadway & A Very Very Smelly Man
Now I'm not a Yankees fan, but seeing a game in NYC is just the thing you have to do when in NYC. Plus it's not like the Orioles are really doing much. It was fun, but the Yankees lost to the Cleveland Injuns in a highscoring cliffhanger...1-0. The next day I got to see the Statue of Liberty and meet my friend Adam for lunch. I went to a Broadway show for the first time later that evening, which was pretty cheap, the show Jerusalem. I didn't quite get it. The show was very entertaining and after seeing the Tony awards a few nights before I was really into the play but I just didn't get the story. Without getting into detail, I kept looking for deeper meanings or satire within the plot but it just wasn't there. It was simply just about a middle aged druggy that had no friends. I got lost on the way back to Colt and Vanessa's and to make matters worse, my phone had died after the play was over. First I got on the wrong train and I got off at a very ghetto stop. No bbig deal, I just hopped back on and went back to Times Square. They were doing construction on the steps to the station I was suppose to get on previously so I had to take an extra fives minutes to get to it from another entrance. This wasn't a big deal, however those few extra minutes was just enough to make me miss my train and wait another 20+ minutes for the next one. When I got on the car on this particular train I walked into the smell of a terrible odor and noticed a homeless guy had his kiester parked at the end of the car, everybody was packed away from where he was sitting. We made one stop....One Frikin' stop, and the train gets delayed for ...you guess it...more construction!! So I'm on this train, stuck with a smelliest person ever for a half an hour before the train began to move again. The doors were open and people would stick their heads out every once in a while, gasping for air. We couldn't hop over to the train car beside us, b/c the people who had already come and gotten off before had packed both cars on each side so we were all stuck....stuck with the homeless smelly guy. People walking in would immediately squint their face and walk out. It was THAT bad. Eventually, finally, I made it back to Queens and somehow remembered where the apartment was from there. Poor Colt was like a worried parent. I think I made it back around 12:30, 2 1/2 hours after the show ended.
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