Comma Dot Comma

Today marks the one-week anniversary of a 14-hour visit to New York City.  Super Sarah had invited me to hang out with her there after she got done with a work conference, so I booked my $35 Chinatown Bus ticket and scurried on up there for a one-night tour.  Scurrying in this case involved standing hopefully in front of a Chinese restaurant in Baltimore, then boarding a van, then boarding a bus, then standing hopefully in front of a Chinese supermarket in NYC waiting for Sarah, who arrived at almost the exact same moment, bearing in tow a tall handsome guy who had flown across the country to surprise her.  Yes, Sarah is a woman that inspires certain men to cross continents, and I don’t blame them.
I had two main goals for this trip, apart from some Q. T. with Sarah:  one, to look cool like a real New Yorker, and two, to get quoted on Overheard In New York.   Goal number one involved changing in bathroom of the dim sum restaurant we’d stumbled across in our search for food! glorious food! at 10 pm.  None of us had ever done dim sum thing, and I understand it’s more of a lunch activity, what with all the dainty parcels, which I ate in a manner that can be described more as alarmingly voracious than dainty.

We really liked the pink things and the pork buns and our brothy soups.   And that shirt looks boring, but it is actually a lace minidress worn over jeans.  I had a little wooden-bead purse to go with it that a some guy told me looked like garbanzo beans, what did I have it for, in case I got hungry?  I count it as scoring a point a stranger comments on my fashion choice, even if it is a slightly insulting comment.

Filled up with tiny wraps and rolls and buns, we asked, what next? We decided to make our way to the Village on foot, people-watching and peering into bars and clubs in the hopes of finding some interesting live music.  We didn’t find any live music (what? midnight on a Friday night? Where we, Topeka?).  Whenever we wandered among large crowds of people I would loudly insert non-sequiturs into the conversation in the hopes of achieving goal #2, confusing my two compatriots.  What did tame armadillos have to do with cheesecake?  I waggled my eyebrows significantly at them until they remembered.  That particular strategy I don’t recommend for those with similar goals, because the non-sequitur thing tends to kill a conversation right quick.  I also don’t know if I achieved my goal, since I forgot to check the website afterwards.  Seems unlikely.  No one caught their friend’s eye knowingly as I passed.  Nor did I overhear anything worth reporting.  I do have some advice for the fashion-forward skinny-legged men among you:  apparently the up-and-coming thing is very pointy multicolored boots and extremely tight pants.
We were tired of fruitless walking and decided to take a spin around the top of the world instead. We taxied to this hotel with a rotating rooftop bar, where I ordered a drink that looked more like a fresh fruit salad than a cocktail and then tried unsuccesfully to line up my cocktail napkin with the city skyline.  The napkin had silhouettes of all the buildings we were slowly passing.  Sarah and I teased her tall handsome fellow about being a lightweight until we tasted his martini ourselves, which was apparently straight bourbon with a cherry in the bottom.  hooo–eee.   We didn’t get drunk but it seems like a bad idea to drink too much in a bar that is actually rotating beneath you.  Talk about unsettling.  Once I was finally satisfied that no blueberry or melon chunk had gone uneaten from my drink, we headed out into the night once again, this time in search of cheesecake.

The deli where we ate cheescake, I forget the name of it though it is something so obvious I might as well just wear a sign that says “culturally unaware”, had a lot of pictures of famous people who had also eaten cheescake there.  We sat below pictures of Barry Manilow, a young chipmunk-cheeked Corey Feldman, and some house remodeling guy that had “You can do it!” printed across the photo.  Cheesecake seemed like a reasonable 2 am food choice until the pieces actually arrived.  They were each the size of a size 10 men’s shoe.  Here’s a picture Sarah took of our cheescake bites:

Then it was off to sleep for a few hours.  The next day we wandered around some more near and in Central Park.  Note to future park visitors:  if you are walking aroud the reservoir (pronunciation: rez-eh- VWAH), and you want to get off the one-way track, plan your exit well in advance as it seems to be quite fenced in.

I ate a bagel with tofu vegetable cream cheese, and a nasty soggy hotdog, and then it was time to wait uncertainly in front of the Macy’s side door for a bus home.  Good times were had by all.