It's been a few days since my last real post, so there's lots to cover here.
First, let me just say that I am so glad Mary J. Blige was once an alcoholic drug abuser with serious man problems who has since found love and the lord, because that really has helped her write and perform some great songs. Please don't lose all the drama, Mary. We need some of it for the music.
On a less pleasant note, the hot water our NYC building didn't have beginning on Thursday never returned. Thank God for Exhale Spa, so that I could actually take a hot shower yesterday. I suppose the timing of our departure couldn't have been better. I mean, it only could have been better if our landlords had actually informed us they expected us to be out by 11:00 this morning, and the housekeeper was coming at 12:00, and new tenants were moving in at 2:00. But yeah, other than that, our timing couldn't have been better.
All of the Manhattan stars aligned before our departure, creating the perfect storm of lunacy. In addition to not having any hot water in our building for the past couple of days (which led to the notice posted on the door being vandalized by angry tenants), we met an awesome crazy man on our way to dinner last night. I made the mistake of too openly admiring his dog:
Me - "He's so cute!"
Crazy Man - "What about the dog?"
Um, whoa.
The man went on to spend 30 minutes talking to us about his desire to cross-breed more Labs with Great Danes; his intent to work at Google so that he could take his dog to work (I didn't have the heart to tell him that's a Bay Area thing only); the great book he was working on that "could be bigger than Harry Potter," and enlighten us about the "PGA" - that's "Pretty Girl Alert" - that he makes use of to try to meet women. (I, by the way, am proud to say I set off his PGA.) He raved about chamber music and ballroom dancing, and informed us he runs up to 140th and Riverside Dr. every morning to swim 2 miles at 6:30 a.m. That extreme physical activity, um, was not apparent. But kudos to him. A Cal alum, he started to disparage Stanford alums as "pretentious jerks." It was awkward when he discovered we're both pretentious jerks.
Ah, I'm going to miss these crazies.
But alas, we made it out of New York alive - shitty American SUV and all. No, seriously, I can't believe people buy American cars. We drove out here in a Subaru Tribeca. It was awesome. It appeared too small to accommodate us and all of our stuff, but true to Japan, it was small and amazingly efficient. Now, we're tooling around in a Chevy Trailblazer. And true to America, it's large and totally inefficient. We could hardly figure out how to cram everything in the vast interior of wasted space, and after poor Moby was clobbered by a suitcase and a duffle bag, we pulled over 3 minutes into the drive to fix it - then pulled over 5 minutes later to rearrange entirely, after heading the wrong way on the Hudson Pkwy. Honestly, when the rental car company requested options for this vehicle, they sprung for a steering wheel and tires. That's it. On a positive note, the lack of ammenities is a great theft deterrent, since the car already looks like it's been stripped.
New York now seems like a long time ago, since we are now officially in the South. How do I know? We stopped at one of MANY Chick-fil-A restaurants (thankfully, it's not Sunday), a drink option was sweet tea, and the woman I ordered it all from called me "Baby" and "Boo Boo."
God bless this place.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment