Random Travel, Part 6

Manhattan, New York City, All day (YUHZ) 10/24/08

I’m on a train right now on my way back to VA. I’ve never taken the train to/from any place except when in a theme park. I’m not going to lie, it’s kind of exciting having all of these firsts happening so close to one another. The downside? Trains can’t move nearly as fast as planes, so I’m going to be on the train for another 8 hours…and that’s not as exciting as other things that I’ve encountered on this trip.

So Friday was my free day. By free day, I mostly mean ‘the day when I was free to go around and look at things and buy things and not feel at all guilty about it’. Nobody needed anything particular done at the theatre, and I had no other responsibilities, so I took the day for myself to do and see things that I wanted to do and see. Awesome.

I slept a little bit late which was wonderful after the exhausting day that I had had before. Between helping at the theatre, getting lost in Brooklyn and driving the rental truck back and forth, I was really tired and slept until about 11:30. I got up, got dressed, and took the subway to Manhattan for a fun day.

The funny thing is that even though there is so much to do in New York City, it can be really difficult to plan out what it is that you want to do. I wanted to do everything; see a show, meet up with friends, have delicious sushi, buy cute clothes, see sights I hadn’t seen before- but when it came to actually doing things, it was hard to choose one. So as I was walking from the theatre more towards midtown, I saw a Sprint store and decided to take care of order number one: getting a new phone. Of course, I’m hardly a rich guy, so its not like I walked in there looking to invest in something serious. But we’ve all seen the commercials for the Rumor and everyone knows that if you’re going over your text messages by the hundreds, have switched to a plan to accommodate that and are seriously hampered by T9, its time to move into the slide phone age. Hence, my cute little Rumor. She’s black with a blue stripe, and I lovingly named her ‘Brooklyn’, Brook for short. I have this thing with naming electronics, and since I don’t often own cars, I’ve transposed that naming desire over to electronics. And since I’m talking about it, I’ll just take the few seconds to say right now that I completely love the thing. This phone is completely awesome. I can create my own ringtones out of my own songs (currently All-Night Yahtzee’s Hey Jude serenades me every time my phone rings), I can text twice as fast as I could before, it’s a new phone so the battery life isn’t completely lame, and it slides open so that I have access to a plethora of new features (not to mention the QWERTY keyboard makes my phone-internet life a lot easier, something that was virtually impossible on my last phone.) Brook is awesome, and I’m so glad that I got her (for almost HALF price, no less. I *heart* New York, indeed.)

After getting the phone, Brandon took me towards Mid-Town via a route that would take me by the World Trade Center crater. This is the fourth time that I’ve been to the city since the towers collapsed, and I’ve never seen the site. It was, for some inexplicable reason, very important to me to get to see it before construction began on the new towers intended to take the place of the old ones. We walked by and I got to look on it from a park across the street. The funny thing is that there isn’t much there. I mean’ of course there’s the absence of a building where there used to be one, but aside from that there isn’t a huge to-do. It’s like any other construction site. It was kind of haunting to know that hundreds of people died at that very spot, completely randomly, completely unprepared. It was strange and somehow profound to think that I watched it happen on the television, and that for as long as I lived the memory of so much faceless death would be seared in my brain, having occurred at the very spot I was looking over in real time. As morbid as it was, it was also rather fascinating.

I feel a little dizzy, but I can’t tell if that’s the drinking that Dave and I did before I came to the train station or the inevitable motion sickness. I can’t say I’ve ever tried typing while in motion.

Anyway, after my WTC moment I was starved. It was past noon and I hadn’t had breakfast. What did I get? Sushi, of course. I got Bento Nouveau sushi at this corner restaurant, and it was, in a word, DELICIOUS. I’ve had a lot of sushi, but this ranked at the top. So good. I had to fight the pigeons while eating it in the park, but I ultimately won and had a delicious lunch.

While I was eating, this very kind round-faced African woman asked me if I would take a picture of her in front of this flower bed with bright yellow flowers. She asked me to take it on her manual disposal camera, and I found something charming in her possession of the already-antiquated disposal camera. Taking her picture though, her bright white smile contrasting her dark skin but complementing the bright flowers, set upon me that internal floatiness of a genuine New York moment. I’ll probably remember that until I die. I wish I’d thought to get a picture of her and the flowers on my own camera.

After lunch in that park I decided to get walking to see what else I could find. I took the train to Times Square to walk around and sort of feel things out. I doubt I’ll ever get sick of the place. It’s tried, yes, and it’s touristy, yes, but even if I lived there, I think that I would enjoy being able to visit a place so full of life. I actually like being bumped into by people bustling to and from work and home and lunch and meetings, and I really like the possibility of at any moment seeing someone I know. (On Sunday afternoon I ran into Natalie Caruncho, a girl that I went to school with, RIGHT outside of the Ohio Theatre. Strangely enough, she also knew one of the guys from Surrender. It’s such a small world.) I walked around and randomly took pictures of things like any good tourist, and after the window shopping had gotten my salivary glands properly juicing, I found H&M. Now I’ve learned not to have a country boy attitude in that store. Typically, I’d rush in and grab everything I liked and buy it right then. Today, I went in, grabbed everything I liked and walked around with it for a little bit. In the end, I went with this beautiful dark green sweater with a high neck, a plum T-shirt to go with it, and an ivory colored knit cap with a brim. There were also these great black pants and a white sweater with a half hood, but I had to edit my choices to feel better about myself, and am glad to have done so.

That took a few hours, and after that I had some time to kill. I got my sister and grandmother scarves from one of the vendors near Bryant Park. $5 for the ‘pashmina silk pashmina silk!!!’ scarves that I bought them, and later in the day, only six bucks for the neon green ‘I *heart* NY’ shirt that I bought my brother. Not a bad run if I do say so myself (considering I also bought two scarves for myself.) After all of this (and a LOT of time wondering if I would be allowed to rest inside the library), I went back to Times Square to contemplate either seeing a show or a movie.

I know it seems lame to see a movie when in the center of Manhattan, but after my talk a few nights previous with B and Hartley (‘everyone should see a movie in Times Square at least once. It’s like a question and answer session’) I couldn’t resist. I saw ‘Synecdoche New York’ at the Times Square AMC. Um…wow. Firstly, the audience was SILENT. Not a peep, except to laugh at the amazingly morbid Charlie Kaufman jokes. This movie was really a rather incredible feat. You ever read a book that it takes you days and days and sometimes weeks to properly digest and to some degree understand? This movie was that way. It was long and confusing but riddled with incredible performances and a darkly hilarious screenplay that essentially asserted that no one’s suffering is unique; that we all share our misery via some existential invisible emotional pipeline. Though there are things that I still don’t understand (the house on fire that never burns down…?), I highly recommend engaging in the total mindfuck that is ’Synecdoche New York’ (pronounced ‘sih-neck-duh-key’…I didn’t know this until just tonight. In retrospect, how embarrassing it was to have asked for one adult ticket to ‘cynic-doshe’ NY…) There were street dancers outside that were really entertaining (even though they were wearing UF colors...gross.)

After the movie, I was starved (because though I’ll pay nearly any amount of money for a cold Diet Coke, I will NOT pay five bucks for a small popcorn) and decided that I needed to stop and eat at some place that would allow me to gorge myself in the good-old fashioned carnivorous style. Luckily, Golden Buffet was right down the street from the movie theatre. Let me preface all of this: I’m not really an ’All You Can Eat’ sort of guy. I typically think that buffets are a marketing scheme, because honestly, who can eat enough to actually put a dent in the supply? You pay them an increased amount of money for ’all you can eat’ when you and most consumers ultimately eat exactly what you would have anyway. That said, I thought that I might be buffet hungry and went for it.

I don’t know that I have ever, ever eaten as much Chinese food in one sitting as I did that evening. Plate after plate of pork fried rice and General Tso’s chicken, fried shrimp, noodles and DC, followed strangely but complementary by peaches and those little circle cakes. It was delicious. The servers thought I was weird for taking pictures of my dining experience on my teeny tiny laptop, but I didn’t really mind. As you can see, the picture came out weird and split anyway. At any rate, they refilled my glass and took away the numerous empty plates all the same…

After that, I headed back to the theatre for the end of their rehearsal and then to Brandon’s for sleeping. While at the theatre, the Asst. Dir. Melissa (who is wonderfully kind and really hilarious) and I got to talking about each other’s school, family and living history. Turns out, we’ve traveled similar paths, and when she heard that I am no stranger to the theatre and have a bit of experience with directing/stage managing, she asked me to fill in for her on Saturday until she could get there. Of course I said yes. How cool to essentially stage manage a show that I’d only first seen two days before! This was, after all, part of my trip experience and I was happy to do it.
A fun (and hilariously fast) car ride to Brooklyn ensued, and then a great deal of sleeping occurred. This was good.

There’s a really cute bookish Columbia ginger seated in front of me and a really awkward and adorable dark and floppy haired cook/chef sitting behind me asking me questions and being generally charming. These things make public travel totally worth it. More tomorrow.

PS. If you don’t own Feist’s Let It Die, you’re incorrect. Own it.