I hope Halloween is coming early

There is a guy in my class who is wearing a pair of WHITE Dickies overalls, a brown oxford shirt, work boots. I have to hope this is part of some Halloween costume, and not a fashion statement.

I mean, I guess it's ok as a fashion statement....I'm just not seeing it.

Unmatched

I am uncomfortable with my outfit today. I really am not sure that my jacket matches my shirt. What do you think -- does kelly green match light lavender?

I knew I should have worn my black jacket.

Co-discovery

J1, who is home sick, is apparently occupying herself taking tests at www.tickle.com. Since I'm sitting in a review session with nothing better (or at least nothing more interesting) to do, I was taking the same tests.

J1 says that her ideal city match is New York City -- same for me. Same thing for our flavor, as we're both sour.

But on the issue of signature karaoke songs, we begin to diverge. None of this Britney stuff for me -- I'm all about Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, "I Love Rock-n-Roll"!

In another issue, I figured out why I can never pay attention in law school classes. I think it's because they are either too fast-paced or too slow-paced. Basically, the professors typically go at a painfully slow pace. So I get bored out of my mind, because they are saying the same thing five different ways, or making a point in a paragraph that could be made in a sentence. As a result, I start surfing the internet, playing games, blogging, or whatever. Soon, of course, I'm mostly tuned out and have no idea what's going on.

Alternatively, the professors start moving really fast. Then, I get bored taking so many notes, and start checking my email. Of course, I can't multitask that well, so soon I don't know what's going on. They're going so fast that I can't figure out where they are, so I stop listening.

Yup, as usual, I've managed to blame my problems on the professors. ha!

Resource Abuse

A professor just sent out an email to the entire law school informing us that his daughter's school was having a "Penny Harvest" and encouraging us to bring our pennies to his office to "contribute to the well-being of NYC."

Can I say, "I don't give two *****!!"?

Seriously. There are dozens of kids who are involved in hundreds of worthy activities. All of these activities have fundraisers. And I want to hear about NONE of them.

This just exhibits the supreme arrogance of law professors. They are so profoundly convinced of their own importance that they think they can spam every email account in the law school with pleas that we bring pennies to their assistant so that their daughter can be the fundraising super-star of her class.

Oh yeah, and I'd like to get a tuition refund for the portion of that secretary's time that is being wasted collecting pennies for this dude's daughter.

Two notes:
1. Starting your email with "Please excuse the institution-wide intrusion" does not solve the problem, and is a rather insincere apology since you are intruding anyway.

2. In the interest of full disclosure, I applied for a summer research assistant position with this professor following my first year of law school. He rejected me in favor of some undergrad who was a family friend.

Grass is always greener

As my readers know, I tend to be a pretty obsessive sports fan. Sometimes, I look at all the time, money, and effort invested in sports -- not to mention the lives ruined by injuries -- and wonder if it's an exercise in futility. On the other hand, sports provide me and many others with plenty of joy and entertainment. fn1. But even more importantly, I think sports can often be viewed as a microcosm of life -- almost like a sociological and psychological lab experiment conducted in view of the entire world. This means we can find mistakes in behavior and learn from them.

Here's the situation: last season, the Miami Heat basketball team had a great season. They signed Shaq as a free agent, who paired with rising star Dwayne Wade to form a super-star duo. With strong role players, they made the Eastern Conference finals, where they lost an extremely close series to the Pistons.

After that kind of performance, you would think they would be pretty satisfied. They needed to add some perimeter shooting to take pressure off of Wade, and Shaq's age and health could be a concern.

But what did the Heat do? They blew up the team, and signed point guards Jason Williams and Gary Payton and forward Antoine Walker. Big names. The "experts" loved it. Many of them made Miami the favorite to win the East. After all, how could you lose when you have added so many stars.

Of course, the season hasn't even started yet, so it's too early to say whether these moves will pay off. But here's the first measure: Detroit and Miami met in the preseason. Miami lost by 19. Obviously, it's the preseason. We can't draw any grand conclusions.

But no one should be surprised if Miami is worse this year. Look who they added:

Jason Williams, a turnover-prone, disruptive point guard who is a pain to coach. He's never really played defense in his life. Oh, and he's an on-the-ball player.

Gary Payton, who used to be brilliant. Anyone who saw Chauncy Billups break him down in the 2004 Finals knows that he's done.

Antoine Walker, a guy who never met a three-point shot he didn't like. He doesn't shoot well from the field (particularly given the number of shots he takes), and his three-point and free-throw shooting are terrible. He's another guy who has to have the ball in his hands to be effective.

These are precisely not the kind of players who were needed around Wade. The Heat didn't need gunners and guys who need the ball in their hands to be effective. They need spot-up shooters and team players who are happy to defer to Dwayne and Shaq.

Yet everyone was drooling over the changes. Why?

Here's where I think the lesson is. People are always wanting something new, and something exciting. They are particularly attracted to "brands" that they recognize. Walker, Payton, and Williams are guys who are regarded as stars. No one knew much about guys like Damon Jones, who they replaced. So whether it was Heat General Manager Pat Riley or Joe Analyst, they make a simple series of assumptions.
1. The Heat didn't win a title last year
2. Therefore, they need to make changes
3. The bigger the change, the better
4. Consequently, the Heat are in great shape because they made a bunch of "big" changes.

Maybe this will work out, and by the end of the season, the team will have gelled and they'll take the next step. I doubt it, however.

Whatever the case, I think it's a reminder to be careful -- don't think that the other side of the fence is always going to be better. Don't believe that a change is always necessarily. And most importantly, don't always believe the hype. Sometimes, what's at hand is the best option.

1. Or, in the case of being a Michigan State football fan, it brings plenty of disappointment and frustration.

Journey Across America

I decided to do some blog-surfing today -- just clicking the "Next Blog" link on the "toolbar" that Blogger puts on the top of each blog. I'd never done this before, as I usually don't spend that much time reading blogs other than those written by my friends.

I found that there is plenty of amusement to be had by looking at random blogs. Everything from some nut who believes that people should subvert the jury system to force the laws to change to some guy who apparently likes to use a lot of drugs and swear a lot.

But I also found one really great blog. It's about a couple who drove from Los Angeles to Chicago to Seattle together. It looks like an engaging story, with some great pictures and stories of the Americana that they ecountered along the way. Check out Ola and Jon's story today.

Van Gogh's Drawings

J1 and I spent the afternoon in a variety of fun outings (Indian food for lunch, seeing the Wallace and Gromit movie, going to the Met, and having dinner). I'm not sure what was my favorite, and since you all probably don't want to hear me ramble about the food I ate, I'll avoid detailed restaurant reviews. I will say one thing: check out Celeste (Amsterdam above 84th) for good Italian food, good atmosphere, and reasonable prices.

The Wallace and Gromit movie is excellent as well, although possibly eclipsed by the short film featuring the penguins from Madagascar which runs directly before W&G. You know, I think penguins are pretty much a sure-fire way to make a good movie. It's like adding a cheerleader to a football game. You just cannot lose, from Billy Madison to March of the Penguins to Madagascar.

But the whole point of this post, as you might have guessed from the title, was to talk about the new Van Gogh exhibition at the Met, featuring his drawings. These drawings make up a majority of his early work, and a fair amount of his later work. He strongly believed that in order to paint effectively, he needed good drawing skills. A fairly logical assumption, I suppose.

It was interesting to see the evolution of his work. He started with very simple one point and two point perspective drawings. Kind of like what I did in eighth grade art class where I drew a line for the horizon and made a point in the center. All lines converged (or would have converged) at that point. Of course, the main difference between my work and his was that his, even at the earliest stages, was that his was beautiful, brilliant, incredibly artistic, and conveyed so much emotion, rather than looking like ugly **** drawn with a ruler. But other than that, it was identical. (Just for the non-sarcasm-detecting people in the audience, I'm joking here. I was just proud that I knew what one-point and two-point perspective were and could identify it in his drawings.)

My larger point is that from these basic beginnings, he went so far. His later drawings have such an incredible sense of perspective. He had an incredible talent for using simple pen-strokes to give such a sense of depth. Not to mention emotion. The degree to which he was able to convey his feelings with simple black and white was really great.

I bought a postcard of one of my favorite drawings, of fields in France.


They also had some of Van Gogh's paintings on display, which I prefer to the line drawings. While he was able to communicate so much through his drawings, when he took the same skills and added the color and depth of paint, the results were incredible.

If you get a chance to stop by the Met to see the exhibit, I would highly recommend it. Remember, if you're a Columbia student, you get in free. Even if you're not, the posted admission prices are technically just "suggestions" -- you can donate whatever you feel you can afford.

And one more picture -- this is Van Gogh's Starry Night (one of my favorites of his), from last week's visit to the MoMA:

Cold-blooded Killer

K1 has a brilliant and hilarious post today about her fight against the roach infestation that is currently plaguing her apartment. It's classic K1 writing -- dramatic, beautifully verbose and descriptive, and really funny. The fact that it sounds like a sendup to Dante or something of that sort only adds to the humor.

So if you haven't already read it, scurry over there like a good cockroach and read it right now. But tuck your antennas behind your ears and disguise yourself as a human, or else you will be quickly looking at the business end of a brutal black heel.

University Gender Gap

*As much as I am loathe to admit it, this post contains a link to an article in USA Today. However, I'm not exactly sure how this article got into this newspaper, since it clearly is too long to fit on one page.*

USA Today has an article out about the growing gender gap in college composition, as women occupy an increasing number of spots in university classes. After decades of exclusion from higher education, women are now taking a growing majority of seats -- a reversal from the 1960s which seems to be growing.

Obviously, there are some causes for concern here, particularly because the gap is most acute in lower-income minority communities (in fact, among students from upper-income families [70,000 and up] are split evenly between men and women). There are questions of whether colleges are offering programs or learning environments that are attractive to men, particularly those in low-income demographic groups. With declining professional opportunities for people without college degrees, colleges do need to figure out how to serve everyone, not a select income group or gender.

But I think this research may be missing nuances of what is driving the gender gap. As mentioned above, I think a key thing keeping men from attending college, or graduating if they do go, is a lack of programs which they find desirable. Investing money, time, and effort into a degree that is not interesting to them. People are going to be more likely to decide to get a "head start" on their careers and skip out on the college process.

But why would men do this in greater numbers than women? Well, here's my theory: There is increasing evidence that there are women who are getting college degrees with little intention of using them in the long-term, as they prefer to become full-time homemakers after getting married and having children. This may give women a rather different time horizon under which they consider their college decisions.

Let's say you've gotten the message that college is "good," in some way. You don't really know what you want to do with your life, and most college degree programs don't sound that fun. Are you going to be more likely to pursue college if you think you'll be in this unexciting career for five to ten years, or for the rest of your life?

I'd guess that people with a shorter time horizon would be more likely to make the college gamble.

Of course, there are some problems with this thesis. Most obviously, people with a short time horizon would seem less inclined to undertake the effort of college at all, given the limited period during which they would gain returns from this investment. In addition, I would assume that more women from upper income brackets plan to stay home with their children -- it's just not financially practical for women in many other brackets. Yet it is in the highest income levels where we see the smallest gender gap (2%).

However, despite these problems, I think the differing motivations and time horizons for men and women in making educational decisions are an important part of determining why the gender gap exists, instead of simply assuming that men need increased motivation or colleges need to change to attract men.

My new shirt, and why it won't make me happy for long

While I was out in California in August, I picked up this great Michael Kors shirt on sale at Macy's. It was a little more expensive than I usually like my shirts to be, but it is a special shirt.



The pattern is great -- bold without being too flashy. The cloth is smooth and supple, with a soft sheen. The pink and milky are such a great color combination, and it is all topped off by the textured vector design woven into the cloth. Oh, the styling is great, with mitered cuffs and a slim cut.

So you get the idea -- I like this shirt. It makes me feel good to wear it. I am happy just touching it. But guess what? Those happy feelings are not going to last for long.

As I was thinking about how much I like the shirt, I was reminded of one of my political philosophy classes from undergrad. We were studying Rousseau. The professor hilighted a passage from the work we were studying, most likely from The Social Contract, although I can't say for sure.

Rousseau said something like this: A man gets something new, and it makes him happy for a time. But slowly, he tires of it, and then he has to get something else new and even better to make him happy.

Now at the time, I had just gotten a brand new Bugle Boy fleece pullover at the local Khol's grand-opening sale. Now this may seem like a questionable fashion choice, and in many ways it was. However, given the context, it was a big deal for me.

First, this being the late 90s, fleece pullovers were still a typical fashion choice, particularly on a college campus. Second, I wasn't quite so caught up in "clothes" as I am now, so it was satisfying for me.

But the biggest reason I was so happy about it was that it was a serious upgrade from my previous light-weight jacket. See, in high school, when I had a $100 per year budget for clothes and shoes, I had bought this ass-ugly Spaulding windbreaker at a second-hand store. (And no, we're not talking about cool "vintage" clothing here. We're talking about hand-me-downs that you actually have to buy.) I wanted one of the cool Nike or Reebok windbreakers, but those were out of my price range. So I bought the poor-man's substitute. It probably cost $8 or $10, which at the time was a staggering sum.

Now this particular jacket was of a late 1980s-vintage. It was a patchwork of colors -- teal, fuschia, purple, red, blue -- all long since out of style. I would post a picture of it, but I'm quite sure that no picture of it exists, because I avoided wearing it whenever possible.

I had it for about two months before I figured out that it was reallly uncool, and regretted buying it. But there wasn't much that I could do. I already had it, and my mom was not going to be sympathetic to my opinion that the jacket was made up of not one, but several, lame colors.

I spent the next four years trying to avoid wearing that jacket whenever possible. My mom, of course, was constantly trying to force me to wear it, as she strongly believed in the importance of wearing proper layers of insulation at all times. I would take it off the second I got in the school door and wad it up in the bottom of my locker. I would wait to put it on until I saw my mom pulling into the school driveway.

As a side note, my mom and I fought constantly about whether I needed to wear a coat or not every spring, fall, and winter for about eight years. I think everything would have been much more simple had I just made it clear that I thought my coats were ugly and uncool and as going to avoid wearing them whenever possible because I was embarrassed. (I should also note that after I discarded the windbreaker, my mom happily took it and wore it for several years.)

Anyway, getting back to the story. I think you get the idea that I DID NOT like this Spaulding windbreaker. So finally, four years after buying it, I made the major investment of buying the new Bugle Boy fleece, for the astounding sum of $16. I was a high-roller in college, I'm telling you.

The fleece made me so completely happy. All of a sudden, I was happy for a cool day on which I could wear a light coat. I adored the fleece. I liked the texture. I liked the pull tab on the zipper, which was puffy plastic that encased reflective material -- it was fun to squeeze. The colors were great.

As I sat in my political philosophy class, my new fleece on my lap, I heard Rousseau's words about how new possessions only make us happy temporarily. I fingered the fleece, thinking that I would never grow tired of it. It was too special. I liked it too much. And besides, in my mind, it was the ultimate coat. How could one ever devalue such a perfect piece of clothing?

Needless to say, I grew tired of the fleece. My tastes changed, and I gave it to Goodwill several years ago. Even before I decided that it was passe from a fashion standpoint, I had little love for it. As I wore it more, the "shiny newness" wore off. I no longer derived happiness from wearing it. It was just another commodity.

Eventually, the same thing is going to happen to my Michael Kors shirt. It will start to wear a little. I'll get used to how it looks. It just won't be exciting anymore.

The point of all this, I think, is the ultimate futility of materialism. I've been thinking a lot about it lately. Researching that I read last week pointed out that people become progressively happier as they make more money -- up to $50,000 or so. Beyond that, additional money doesn't seem to add utility to people's lives. In some cases, it's "mo money, mo problems."

I think I am far to prone to chasing money and material things as a proxy for happiness. And while those things can make me happier, it's not going to be a long-term solution. I'm just going to need more things -- probably better things -- to keep being happy. And that leaves me in a endless cycle of chasing more and more money to get this "stuff."

It's a lot to think about. But I want to work on pursuing happiness internally, versus externally.

A rough start

We’re having a marathon session of my “seminar” (it’s like a seminar in format, but it’s not actually a seminar because it’s so large) tonight because we missed the last two weeks of class due to the Jewish holidays.  So instead of two hours of misery, we’re having four hours of fun.

Our time together got off to an inauspicious start when the professor leaned into the microphone and informed us that she has lost her voice.  So we get to hear her raspy whisper over-amplified over the speakers.  It sounds like she’s running her voice through a voice box.  

On the positive side, the dude in front of me is wearing a cool shirt.  I would take a pic of it with my cell and post it, but I think that would weird people out.

It's 3am and I must be lonely...

Once again, it's 3am and I'm still up. I cannot seem to motivate myself to go to bed these days. It just seems that I get my best ideas, and my greatest quantity of motivation, after midnight. fn1.

Today, it was making a header for my website that was keeping me up late. Unless you are blind, or chronically unobservant, you probably see it at the top of the page. Honestly, it didn't turn out quite how I would have liked. I wanted to add some color to the page, have a header that didn't look like "my website from 1998," and drop a few subtle references to my favorite things (besides raindrops on roses, doorbells, sleigh bells, schnitzel with noodles, and the like, that is). Instead, it looks more like you're peeking into the bedroom of a middle-school girl and looking at her bulletin board. Except that instead of pictures of Adam Brody, I have pictures of a basketball. How lame is that?

Of course, it's really late now, and I put a lot of time into that header, so I'm not going to change it just yet. I need to go to bed. As it is, getting up for my 9:45 appointment tomorrow is going to be a bitch.

1. Granted, given my typically low levels of motivation, being at my "most motivated" doesn't necessarily mean much. But still...

Quote of the Day

K1 was talking about how her parents' lessons of courtesy and social manners never really stuck with her.

"I'm such a bad Asian," she lamented. "Of course, if you translate that into Spanish, I'm a mal Asian. uh....huhhuh......get it? I'm a Malaysian. huhhuhhuhhuh."

Yes, K1, we get it.

and no offense to any Malaysians out there.

Welcome to my favorite new blogger

There's a new blogger on the block. And watch out kids -- your blog isn't going to be the coolest one anymore. This is similar to what happened when Jordan came back to the Bulls in 1995, after his attempt at becoming a baseball pro. It's like... "No offense Houston Rockets. We know you won the last two championships and all that. But you're not the best team anymore, and everyone knows that."

So who's causing all this hubbub? My girlfriend, of course.

The beautiful J1 decided to start her own blog this evening. She's also using blogger, and you can find her here.

I'm rather excited about all of this.

First and foremost, it no longer means that I'm automatically the geekiest party in our relationship. People can no longer say, "Oh yeah, BRY is such a geek. He even has one of those Interweb Bee Log things." There's strength in numbers, I'm telling you.

Of course, I realize it is completely delusional for me to envision that J1 is going to be considered as big of a geek as I am just because she has a blog. I'm stuck with the geek tag -- and I'm slowly coming to grips with that.

Being (quasi) serious, the thing that I'm actually excited about is that I know J1 is going to have a great blog. She's a good writer, and she really engages her reader.

In fact, I remember I first was really impressed with her intelligence because of the great emails she'd send me. They were so funny, and written in a way that grabbed you and made you listen to every word she had to say. I think she's going to bring the same writing abilities to her blog, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results.

Of course, I'm doing a little technical consulting for her. Tinkering with the template, and stuff like that. There's other stuff that could be changed, but it depends on what she wants. In the meantime, she has better graphics than I do. Go figure.

I suppose I should have been spending time tinkering with the two other sites I'm supposed to be updating/redesigning, but that can wait for another day. This is more fun.

Going to Jupiter to get stupider (fn1)

I have long believed that law school is causing my brain to rot. I am almost certainly less intelligent and less mentally capable now than I was two years ago when I started this process of legal education.

Of course, it is unfair to blame this problem entirely on law school. My mental acuity has been declining for a number of years. I can't pinpoint the exact time when I peaked, but I think it was probably around my junior year in college. Up until that time, I was progressively learning more and more about a variety of subjects. I was still capable in a wide variety of fields, including science and math. Statistics and econometrics kept calculus fresh in my mind. I was somewhat conversational in Spanish. I was studying early English lit. My writing abilities had steadily improved.

Since then, it's all been down hill. I have forgotten massive quantities of knowledge I once had. My math skills, particularly anything more than simple algebra, are gone. I couldn't FOIL to save my life. My knowledge of literature is pretty much limited to knowing how to spell Shakespeare's name correctly. I don't remember science or Spanish.

Don't get me wrong -- part of this decline is due to the brain rot I suffered while making Excel spreadsheets for Accenture. But don't worry, all the well-rounded knowledge of a liberal arts education has been replaced by the killer skill of being able to prepare a 7.14 - Business Capabilities Readiness Testing deliverable (both plan and script) under the Dow consolidated implementation strategy model. Yeah, that's doing me a hell of a lot of good right now.

But whatever damage was done by Accenture, it's nothing compared to what's happened since starting law school. Not only have I learned little in law school, but I've also forgotten everything I knew before I started.

What's the most clear evidence of this? My blog, of course.

This summer, I was away from law school, and my brain flourished. I posted constantly. Some of the posts were even intelligent, or clever. fn2. The best part was that I didn't even have to think about posts -- posts just came to me. I had more ideas for posts than I could put in writing. And certainly more than my limited audience would ever read.

Language was always coming to me. Words were at play in my head, forming fragments while I was in the shower, or on the train. The writing process was fun, because there was so much in my mind just waiting to come out.

That's over now. Look back in the archives, starting at the beginning of September. Is there one truly interesting post? No. I'm even bored reading my own crap. There are a few posts about friends, featuring pictures, etc. That's fine. Nothing wrong with those. The rest of it is a bunch of random, completely uninteresting notes to myself. A little rant about my diet (or lack thereof) here, a complaint about rain or slow buses there. Throw in some musings on music where I pretend to be a critic but have nothing valuable to add, and you've pretty much got the last two months of my blog.
Even this post is really more of the same. It's just self-loathing that is perhaps written in a slightly more humorous way. Oh, and I am pretty proud of the title. It was the first bit of inspiration I've had in awhile -- so much so that I got out of bed just to write this post when I really should be sound asleep.

So that's what's going on with me. I'm in school, my brain is mush, and I no longer have anything interesting to say. Damn you law school.


1. The title is based on a playground rhyme I heard as a child: "Girls go to Jupiter to get stupider, boys go to Mars to get more candy bars." (Naturally, the gender could be switched, depending on who was throwing the "insult.")

Now beyond the obvious nonsensical nature of the rhyme -- why does going to Jupiter make one more stupid, other than the fact that "stupider" rhymes with "Jupiter"? -- it appears that the girls may have gotten the better end of this bargain regardless. After all, avoiding all the sugar and saturated fat in candy bars was saving them from obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, not to mention cavities.

2. Others were boring drivel. Uh....sorry about that.

What are my favorites?

I'm having a musical identity crisis, to a certain extent. I feel like I need to redo my Friendster profile and dramatically shrink my "favorite bands" list.

See, I frequently listen to my iPod. My iPod currently contains 4221 songs, by 144 artists, spanning 325 albums. Yet if I had my choice, I'd think I could have nothing by Pearl Jam, Jimi, and Led Zeppelin and be perfectly happy. Add in Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, The Who, and The Doors, and I'm not sure I'd miss the rest.

Obviously, I listen to other music on my iPod. But I have to force myself to do so. It's not that I don't enjoy other music. I really do. And I force myself to listen to a variety of music because it challenges my ears and makes me hear new things each time I listen to it. It's just that if you had my iPod and asked, "What do you want to listen to?", I would probably answer with one of the seven bands listed above most of the time.

I guess as I have come to listen to a variety of music over the past three or four years, I have had a sort of conceit that I possess diverse taste. But increasingly, I wonder if that's true. Is the variety of music only the result of an attempt to make myself appear rounded, or a response to fear that I might grow tired of my "favorite" artists?

Anyway, my Friendster profile current contains a laundry list of bands that I enjoy. But maybe it should be pared down to reflect the bands that are actually my favorites.

Ok, I think I'm thinking too much. Time to go to bed.

Yes, I do know how to hail a cab

You know what annoys me? I'll be walking home at night -- probably 10 pm or later -- usually from J1's house. Of course, if I happen to see a bus, I'll catch it and get a ride back to my place, rather than hoofing it. fn1. If I'm feeling really tired, I may just wait for a bus.

But for some reason, gypsy cabs and yellow cabs can't leave well enough alone. If they see me looking down the street for a bus, or just standing at the bus stop, they'll slow to a crawl. They honk. They linger, waiting to see if I want a ride.

Listen, gentlemen. I'm quite familiar with the whole "walking to the curb and raising my arm" gesture commonly used to hail a cab. I'm not blind. I can see you. I see that your light is on. IF I WANT A RIDE, I'LL HAIL YOU.

Seriously. Is that too hard for you to understand. Don't slow down. Don't stare at me. Don't honk. I don't want a ride, and if you behave like that, I'm certainly not going to ask you for one.

Geesh. You'd think I was a child with a "Please Help Me Find My Mommy" sign hanging around my neck.

1. Yes, I'm officially lazy. But come on. When it's after midnight, which would you prefer -- a fifteen-minute walk down mostly deserted streets, or a three-minute bus ride?

Because I got high, because I got high

Dude sitting next to me in class just reeks of incense.  I have the feeling someone was getting friendly with the ganja before class started.  Of course, given how boring this class is, I can’t say I blame him.

Quote of the Day

J1, K1, Slim, and I were standing on the corner of Houston and Lafayette last night, waiting for Joe. A Ford Escape pulls up, window rolled down, and motions for help. I walk over, to see two women sitting inside -- one probably in her mid to late 20s, the other in her late 30s or early 40s.

"Can you tell us how to get to the Village?" the passenger asks.

This is something of a vague question -- it's pretty much anywhere. "What part of the Village?" I reply.

"Oh, anywhere!" says the passenger. "We want the part with all the bars."

"All the bars." Once again, this is extremely vague. This is New York city -- there are bars almost everywhere. The Village, in fact, has several bars, and they're not all in once place. Of course, the fact that I'm not much of a bar-going person -- and I certainly don't hit bars downtown -- made answering the question even more tricky.

So I directed them to St. Mark's area. There's a bunch of bars around in that general area, and it's about as tourist-friendly as the Village gets.

But yeah, if you ever want to know where "the Village" is, then ask me.

Chilling with friends

Yesterday (Sunday), ended up being a very long day. We didn't do anything too stressful, but we did so many things it was pretty tiring.

We started out the day with brunch at Nice Matin. Our friends Brian and Cindy were in town -- well, Brian is always in town, but Cindy was here from DC -- along with one of Cindy's med friends, so they joined J1 and I.

Nice Matin is always a great choice for brunch, particularly for veggies. They have so many great options, and every time I've been there, everyone has been very satisfied with the food. It's probably not as good as Good Enough to Eat or Sarabeth's (both of which are within a couple blocks), but it's still really good food at decent prices, and you can get seated in less than an hour on a Sunday morning, which is a plus.

Cindy and I decided to split the artichoke and leek fritatta and the orange french toast. That way, we could get both eggs and sweet carbs. The fritatta was excellent -- the eggs didn't overpower the more delicate blend of flavors from the artichoke and leek combination.

After brunch, we went shopping, and I helped Cindy pick out purses. Of course, I always love shopping, particularly when someone else is spending the money, so that was a good time. We finished our walk at Lincoln center. Here's a picture of me, J1, Cindy, and Brian.


J1 and I went back to her apartment and I watched a little football. Then, we had to go down to Times Square to watch a play called Fran's Bed with S1 and her friend from out of town.

Of course, we were to the play because it was a horrible public transportation day and the train was running so slow. But, it was good. The plot was somewhat incoherent, but it was written well enough to make you think about the issues that were being raised (having to do with family and whether to pull the plug on someone in a coma). In addition, the acting was great. It featured an all-star cast: Mia Farrow, Julia Stiles, Heather Burns, and Harris Yulin. It was definitely worth the $10 student tickets we bought.

After the play, we met K1 and her boytoy Slim for dinner at B Bar. Slim's friend Joe also joined us. Joe was a cool dude, so it was nice to meet him. And of course K1 and Slim are fun to hang with.

J1 and K1:


Slim and Joe:


After dinner, we headed to St. Mark's for ice cream sandwiches and milkshakes from The Milkshake Company, but they were closed. It was crazy -- we got there at 11:30 and it was like St. Mark's was closed for the weekend. Virtually nothing was open. We went a couple blocks west to Beard Pappa's/Coldstone Creamery area, but they were both closed as well. It's crazy. This is New York, not Topeka. Whole sections of town should not be shut down at 11:30 pm.

So finally, I got home, fourteen hours after leaving to go to brunch. I was so tired that I just crashed in bed, hard.

Carmen at the Met

Tonight, J1 and I went to the Met to see Carmen. It was part of her birthday gift. I would tell you what the other part of her gift is, but it isn't here yet (thanks to the retardness of the USPS), and since she reads this blog, fn1 I can't exactly blow the secret just yet.

Anyway, we had a good time and it was a really great performance. It's such a sad story (some people are just psycho, ya know?), but it was presented really well. The sets were fantastic -- they added so much to the mood of the scenes. The costumes were great as well.

It isn't my favorite opera (I think Sampson and Deliah is my fave of the ones I've seen so far), but it was really good.

You aren't supposed to take pictures in the Met, but I bootlegged a few shots without getting busted (and frankly, there were people who were being far more obvious than I and the ushers seemed to be ignoring it).

Here's the main hall:


The hall has such fantastic lighting. I love the asymmetrical design and the way the crystal sparkles.


J1 and I:


1. Sometimes, particularly when I haven't posted in two weeks, I figure she is the only person reading.