7/2/00

It's 9:30 a.m., and I've been home for about 10 hours now. Morning is not really my best time for writing these entries (nor for doing much else, I've found). Usually when I write diary entries in the morning, it's because I have a lot of stuff to do that day, and writing a diary entry seems to be the least daunting of the tasks before me. This is certainly the case today, when I have to start readying my lab meeting presentation, which I have to give on Friday. Well...I have to give it either this Friday or next Friday. I haven't decided when to do it, and I really ought to decide today. I kind of want to get it over with, but I also want to have plenty of time to devote to my first week in the other lab, and maybe even take off some time for the holiday, which I wasn't planning to do.

It's actually something of a miracle that I got in on time with all my bags last night. My first flight was an hour late taking off due to a baggage-loading delay. The flight attendant announced that the pilot would do "everything possible" in the air to make up the lost time, but I only had a 45-minute layover scheduled, and I was doubtful that the pilot would be able to make up more than 15 or 20 minutes on a 2-hour flight.

Anyway, I don't know how he did it, but we ended up being only 15 minutes late, which actually got me there early for my next flight.

Going back in time a little bit, I suppose I ought to talk about the second half of my time on the East Coast. I got up at the ungodly hour (especially for someone still not fully acclimated to Eastern Time) of 5:15 a.m. so that my mom could drop me at the bus station on her way to work. I then had to spend about an hour hanging out in the Springfield, MA bus depot, which I really don't recommend. The trip, however, was uneventful, unlike the last time I took the bus to New York, when the bus broke down.

I arrived at the lovely Port Authority bus terminal on time and headed downtown to my sister Courtney's office to drop off my bags. I then called my ex-boyfriend Dan and went out to Brooklyn and had lunch with him at this place in Williamsburg called "Diner" which is so hip it was recently replicated as an art exhibit somewhere in Sweden (complete with "regulars" flown over to take part in the installation), which I'd read about in The New Yorker. Given this fact, the food was surprisingly good and fairly-priced, although what we ate was certainly not food you would find in a real diner. We both had the cold cucumber soup, then I had a salad, and Dan had a chocolate sandwich, which looked as sickening as it sounded--it was a baguette covered in a thick layer of butter and pieces of chocolate, sort of like a huge pain au chocolat. But pain au chocolat is not my idea of lunch food, and especially not in combination with cucumber soup.

In the afternoon, I did some shopping, but didn't buy anything. Every once in a while, I'll have a compulsion to buy lots of stuff, but for the most part, I don't really enjoy shopping and I rarely buy anything that I don't really need, like groceries and toothpaste and stuff.

My knee was also starting to hurt from all that wandering around, so I tried to find a movie theater to go hang out in. Most of the movies playing right now sounded dreadful to me, but eventually, I found a theater with an afternoon showing of "Mifune," a Dogma 95 film from Denmark I'd been meaning to see. It was playing at this tiny one-screen theater on 3rd Street and Avenue A, but when I arrived there, 10 minutes before showtime, the theater was locked. A couple of East Village-types were hanging out in front, and asked me if I was there for the movie. "Uh, yeah," I replied, "do you know if they're going to open?" It turned out that the two of them were theater employees and that the manager was on his way. Sure enough, he arrived a minute or two after I did, and let us in. There ended up being only one other person in the audience with me, so there were more employees present than patrons. It was a really nice little theater, though, and I liked the movie a lot, too. It even had a happy ending, unlike most Scandinavian films.

I also noticed, while watching the film, that if you listen to someone speaking Danish it sounds a lot like someone speaking English with a Northern English or Scottish accent. I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising given the linguistic history of that region, but it was a great revelation to me at the time.

That evening, I had dinner with my sisters and my sister Courtney's new boyfriend D. at a fancy Korean vegetarian restaurant. I got there first, so I sat in the lobby for a few minutes reading some of the animal rights literature placed there for the benefit of all the other vegetarians.

Dinner was nice...the food was definitely interesting. It was all quite exotic to me, lots of vegetables I'd never heard of were served, but almost all of it was very good (the one exception to this was this weird savory apple and tofu thing which reminded me of a non-sweet cheesecake).

Thursday, I spent my morning hanging around Courtney's neighborhood in Brooklyn and trying to avoid the intermittent rain. In the afternoon, I headed over to Manhattan and spent most of the afternoon in the Whitney Museum. One of their featured exhibits was a huge collage by Robert Rauschenberg, from which panels were selected and then rearranged by several celebrities, many of whom were non-artists, including Martha Stewart, AIDS activist Dr. Mathilde Krim and annoying journalist Mike Wallace of "60 Minutes" fame.

After that, I met Kymm, Tracing and Jen Bombpop in the park for the free Jonathan Richman/Randy Newman concert. To be honest, I never would have attended this concert were it not for the company, but I really enjoyed it. I have an oft-played Modern Lovers CD in my collection, but other than that, I hadn't really followed Jonathan Richman's career, and I was a little bit surprised to see how charismatic and funny and cute he was on stage. Randy Newman was good, too, although Tracing, Jen and I all disappointed Kymm by failing to be transformed into huge Randy Newman fans, although I do think the fact that we sat through several bursts of rain during his set should count for something.

Afterward, we went out for dinner (the only thing we could find open on the Upper East Side after 10 p.m. was a dingy little pizza place on 3rd Avenue) and then headed down to Union Square for drinks. By the time we ended the evening, it was 1 a.m., so Tracing and I shared a cab back to Brooklyn. Unfortunately, her stop was first, and neither the driver nor I had a particularly good idea of where Courtney's apartment was, so I just had him drop me off at her subway stop, and I walked from there.

Friday was my last day in New York, and I hardly did anything at all. I woke up late, and then packed my bags and made an effort at undoing the chaos I'd unleashed upon Courtney's apartment. I then headed to Manhattan to drop off my bags at my other sister Alison's office, then quickly stopped in at Bloomingdale's to buy a present for Courtney before meeting her and D. for lunch. I think I insulted them both by telling them that their total inability to agree on even one restaurant indicated that they were totally incompatible.

After lunch (Courtney and I ate in one restaurant and D. bought food at the place next door and brought it over to eat with us), I only had an hour or so left in the city, so I walked around, bought some comic books, and then went uptown to meet Alison.

The plan was that Alison and I would head downtown, pick up her car, drive to LaGuardia to piuck up her boyfriend, Parker, whom I'd also never met, and then we'd drive back to Amherst. We both expected that the traffic would be horrendous, but it actually ended up being not so bad, and we made it to LaGuardia in about an hour, so we were early picking up Parker. The trip home wasn't so bad, either, even though I had to drive for the last couple of hours because Alison was practically falling asleep at the wheel.

And then yesterday, I spent most of the morning doing laundry and packing and traveling. And now I'd really better start doing some real work.

The forum: How do you feel about New York City?