I think I've mentioned that I'd love to move to New York. Manhattan's a little more expensive than I expected, but I think I've worked out a feasible plan for survival. Here's the breakdown of expenditures (assuming a salary of $2000 a month) for a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village:

$1800 - rent
$1.05 - Tic-tacs
$0.33 - ramen noodles
$20.00 - laundry
$30.00 - MetroCard
$3.00 - 2 loaves of day-old bread
$15.00 - 8-pack of Puppy Chow for finicky pups
$5.00 - socks
$31.50 - 30 Hebrew National all-kosher hot dogs (from vendors)
$25.00 - Gucci key chain (for prestige)
$50.00 - vintage Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine
$19.12- water filter

Possible extra income:

Sell CDs/organs
Become world-famous artist with weekly show at the Whitney
Patent new street drug

Manhattan here I come!

My favorite show finally gets its props!

Andy squared (and a bit blurry)

Nick calls these "brush cleanings."

(hush)

Q. What do you call a blind dinosaur? A. A do-you-think-he-saurus?

Cityscape

Grand Central in its natural habitat

when all else fails, stack upward

Central Park in four tiny parts that you can cut out and paste side by side on your dashboard

This morning we got up early. We ambled outside with our bulky bags and waited for our shared-ride bus thingie. It was raining, naturally, so we stood under the hotel awning. A friendly old man (who may have been tipsy) teased me: "If your mother knew you were outside in a sleeveless blouse on a day like this, she'd give it to you good! Am I right? Am I right? Ha ha!" He was great, but then he and another old fellow took off in pursuit of two older ladies at the end of the block, tapping their canes and laughing about the conquest. The bus was half an hour late—we were in the process of hailing a cab when its smiling grill came around the corner. It was a quick, harrowing ride to LaGuardia as the bus clattered down brick streets and sailed across the bridge, barely missing a thousand obstructions. Didn't take nearly as long as the ride to the hotel.

Is it just me, or does it take way less time going through the airport than they tell you? That two-hour thing is kind of a joke. You get your boarding pass in a jiffy, say bye-bye to your checked bags, and head to the bathroom one last time. You doff your shoes and zip through security. And then you sit. You read your entire Grisham paperback, including the acknowledgments, and then you sit some more. You stare at your fellow passengers and make up biographies for them. I bet that woman is a real estate agent. I bet that guy is having an affair. Before long, though, your fellow passengers notice you've been staring at them, and so you have to avert your gaze so as not to seem like some kind of freak, which, of course, you are. You stare everywhere and nowhere, until your shifty gaze starts to attract the attention of the airport personnel. Then you get out your book, and start to re-read it. You sit so long you start to feel like you've always been there, like you're a character in some Beckett play, waiting for a friend who will never arrive. It's exhausting, really.

That's the irritating part of flying. The part I like is that you can be in a totally miserable, dreary, wet day (which we were), but when you get on the plane you just fly right out of it. Flying makes me giddy and anxious and all strung out. I'm too aware of my mortality to completely feel secure at those heights, but I can't stop looking out the window anyway. The clouds are glorious clumps of confectioner's sugar, or spread out thin like cotton, but always beautiful, and it's thrilling to think that hardly anyone else will ever get to see the top of a particular cloud. But I'm seeing it—30,000 feet above the ground in a metal box that is held in place by impossible forces.

We landed safely, and all our baggage showed up at the proper time. My Dylan record even survived the travel. Overall, it was a glorious trip—I loved every minute of it. The New York I saw was a fabulous, diverse, vibrant place, and although it was uniquely American in flavor, it felt like it contained the whole world.

I want to move there.

Nick's not so sure.

We went walking this morning and ended up at the U.N. building. The whole set-up is pretty impressive, what with the long row of national flags outside and the building itself rising like a monolith against the sky. Name-tagged delegates were filing in and out. A man came up to Nick and started chattering in Russian. There were some great sculptures outside, including this one:

Took the train down to Little Italy for lunch. The restaurant we picked was called Cha Cha's, and apparently it has been featured in several mafia-themed films, including one of the "Godfather" films. The menu was designed to look like a newspaper, and it had a picture of the owner with Tony Danza. We sat in a lovely outdoor cafe area with high walls and a large statue of a green lion. Like so many places in New York, it was designed to create the illusion of solitude. Just a few old men chatting in the corner, some flowers scattered around, and a big blue square of sky overhead. I had baked ziti and peach iced tea, both of which were unbelievably good.

On to the Village! Lovely and notorious Greenwich Village. What to say? It took us awhile to walk there, but it was well worth it. We scoured the book stores, I got some earrings from a little Tibetan shop, and we stopped to sit at a shaded park where all the tables had chess boards on them. Then we went in search of a record store. We had the addresses of several, but our crappy map wasn't detailed enough so we did a lot of wandering around. After what seemed like a zillion miles, we found the site of one such store, only to discover it had moved to Avenue A in the East Village. Curse you Sonic Groove! All was not lost, though. Further down the block we discovered a delightful little vinyl shop called House of Oldies, where I picked up a sealed, unopened, totally unspoiled copy of Bob Dylan's first album for next to nothing. I think I understand nirvana now. Despite the goodly number of leather shops, the Village didn't quite have the outlaw-artist feel to it that I was expecting. Nevertheless, I dug its quiet hip-pitude.

Just to fill in the gaps, we actually arrived in New York on Saturday (so Day #1 is technically Day #2). Airports are always exhausting, but once we got off the plane we were picked up by one of those shared ride shuttle services, which dilly-dallied around in Times Square for another hour and fifteen minutes. By the time we got to our hotel, we were so exhausted we just sat at a bistro and stared at the walls, drooling imperceptibly. So now you know what happened before Day #1. And like most prequels, it's not very interesting.

(Today) I saw:

1. a sign advising me to curb my dog
2. the Chrysler building
3. the Fubar
4. layered parking lots
5. the Trump International Tower
6. Bleecker Street

This morning we took the subway down to the site of the Trade Centers. I didn't take pictures, and I don't feel like writing about it, except to say that I felt like I shouldn't be there. Afterward, we walked around Wall Street and saw the New York Stock Exchange. The original area is much smaller than I expected. I kept looking for Michael Douglas carrying that gigantic mobile phone he had in that movie, but all we saw was a boatload of fancy suits and some group that was protesting the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Chinatown. Extremely crowded and full of narrow little stores that are about a doorway wide and extend ten or fifteen feet back. I haven't seen so many cops clustered in a single area since I've been here. The shops feature great shoes and pretty silk scarves. Young guys wandering around offer merchandise that is a little more questionable (Rolex watches, etc). Nick is pretty sure he was offered crack.

Soho is only blocks away, but it might as well be a thousand miles. That's the thing about Manhattan—you can cross the street and it's like you're in a different city altogether. We swung by the Jack Spade store, where Nick bought a dead-sexy bag for his laptop. We also visited the nearby Apple store. With its translucent stairs and chrome accents, the store mirrored the design scheme of its products. It was like walking around inside a Mac. About half the stores in Soho are trendy, one-of-a-kind boutiques; the other half are franchise projects like Eddie Bauer and J. Crew. The whole place has a funky, free-thinking feel to it. Here's a poster I saw:

Soho displays may be a bit schizophrenic—Prada purses are featured between ping-pong paddles and first editions of Lolita—but somehow the whole thing works.

Subways. I love the subway. There is a lot of condensation on the ceilings, and so it's not uncommon to see little stalactites hanging from the beams above your head. There are also some great mosaics on the walls, most of which are appropriate for each particular stop. For instance, the Natural History Museum stop features a long hallway depicting a veritable ark of animals and insects. It's cool. And then you step onto the train. Riding the subway is like being on that boat in Willy Wonka. The car races along under the earth like an out-of-control roller coaster. You look out the windows and see only blackness, occasional flashes of graffiti, and the faint glow from the train's headlight. Is it raining, is it snowing—is a hurricane a-blowing?

I saw:

1. Battery Park
2. the Brooklyn Bridge
3. about a billion ads for that freaking "Day After Tomorrow movie
4. the Statue of Liberty (sort of—through layers of fog)
5. a sculpture that was in the lobby of one of the Trade Center buildings. It's now a memorial site, and there is a flame burning at the base
6. a lady who I thought was totally crazy until I saw that she was using one of those earpiece cellphone thingies
7. taxis, taxis everywhere

Morning: Central Park. It's much, much bigger than I was expecting, with an atmosphere that is part play and part pure relaxation. Putting this lush park in the middle of New York is the best bit of feng shui imaginable. Lots of families and sunbathers and business people, just enjoying a few moments away from the bustling crowds. We walked for several hours, and ended up at the John Lennon "Imagine" mosaic, which was a re-creation of a mosaic found at the ruins of Pompeii. It was covered in flowers and surrounded by tourists.

We spent the afternoon at the Museum of Natural History, where we saw everything from a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton to a giant petrified tree stump. One of the displays was a life-sized humpback whale hanging in the center of an enormous room. Rippling blue light was projected overhead. It was lovely, and I wanted to live there. Maybe just camp out beside the polar bears. The great thing about the museum is that there are a lot of things to touch, as well as see. In the hall of meteorites and minerals, you can actually touch examples of both. That's a big change from the usual boring gig at mineral exhibits, where lovely natural tourmaline and jade pieces sit stuffily behind glass—too aloof to acknowledge your presence.

I'd like to say a few words about the Duane Reade pharmacy, which Nick affectionately refers to as the Donna Reed store. These little drug stores are absolutely everywhere in New York—more prolific than Starbucks, even. They're handy and helpful when you find yourself suddenly in need of a nail file or some Band-Aids (for the bloody stumps your feet have become), but I can't help feeling somewhat disconcerted by their ubiquitous presence. It's a little like some mercantile Big Brother that's always watching you from down the street.

And for the love of god, why does everything close at 9 o'clock? I was under the impression that this is "the city that never sleeps." So why does every coffee shop and deli close just when I'm getting ready for a serious caffeine infusion? The bars and clubs are open, of course, but I have yet to find much else. Maybe it's just the part of town we're in.

I saw:

1. the Guggenheim
2. a flamboyant man with a white wig and a long, complicated, black and white patchwork dress
3. more pigeons than at a Hitchcock film festival
4. a billion-year-old meteorite that weighs more than 34 tons
5. Cleopatra's Needle (with lobster claw inset)

We did better on the subway today. A few wrong guesses, but mostly everything was right on track. One thing I do not get is how so many women wear tiny spindly high-heeled shoes when they have to trek up and down the gajillion steps in the cavernous metro system. One time, we found ourselves stepping off a subway car only to go up four extremely long sets of stairs to get to the surface. We must have been close to the center of the earth. Subterranean homesick blues indeed.

The MoMA in Queens was the first official stop for the day. This museum has some of my favorite paintings, including Rousseau's "The Sleeping Gypsy," and various pieces by Picasso, di Chirico, and Salvador Dali. One of the featured exhibits was a retrospective of the work of Dieter Roth. I knew virtually nothing about Roth before, and now I think I know a bit too much. He was perhaps the most prolific artist who ever walked this earth. The exhibit just kept going on—room after room—crammed full of elaborate, messy pieces that both intrigued and repelled. One room was dedicated to Roth's experiments with decaying food. He used chocolate as a medium on a whole bunch of sculptures, and let bananas and sausage decompose under glass. The strangest of his pieces, called simply "Dung Bunny," was sculpted from rabbit droppings and hay. Let's hope this doesn't catch on at Cadbury.

Many of the stores in New York have their doors open and their goods spilling out onto the sidewalk, as if welcoming you inside. Lots and lots of bead stores. Men with tables full of knock-off designer purses on every corner, as well as bootleg movies that are still in the theaters. On our way to the CBGB club we passed through the East Village, and it seemed like the first place where real people actually live (not just Prada mavens and Trump clones). Beautiful murals, too.

I saw:

1. the B&H camera store, which was huge and had metal detectors at the front door
2. Queens!
3. Madison Square Garden
4. the New York Public Library
5. a man with a sign strapped to his back reading "get your own personalized I.D. card" (sounded legit to me)
6. some freaky ad campaign for a new music network, starring a certain Haymish Fuse, who has a lazy eye and a red-striped bowtie. A banner at the bottom reads, "boy bands still pose a threat to our society."

People in New York are much nicer than they are reputed to be. They don't ordinarily make eye contact, but I've found that if you approach them with big, helpless tears streaming down your face and beg them for directions, they are more than happy to accommodate you.

We had quite a time with the subway. If you get a subway map, it's easy enough to figure out which line you need to get you somewhere—the tricky part is figuring out where that line is and, when you find it, whether it is going in the appropriate direction. We did a whole lot of backtracking, and a lot of walking that we didn't need to. On our way to 34th street, we were about to give up and call a cab when we had an assist by a friendly old couple from Brooklyn ("I tell you, it is not the same Brooklyn I remember"). Even so, it wasn't long before we were walking on bloody stumps. With every step, I cursed those wretched cretins at the shoe store who promised this pair of bricks would be excellent for walking in. May rats vomit on their corn flakes and devour their brain matter. Anyway, about five o'clock I switched to classic tenny runners, and my feet have been recovering nicely since.

We went through all nine floors of Macy's, which was marvelous and had old wooden escalators that reminded me of a contraption that somebody's eccentric grandfather would have made. When we finally got back to the bottom floor, I realized I had left a sack with a comic book in it up in the seventh floor bathroom. Nick and I shook our heads but decided to go through with a quixotic rescue mission anyway. Believe it or not, the bag was still there. What with all the traffic in and out of those stalls, I figured it would have been gone with the wind. Either people here are really honest, or they're just not into comics (hmm...a tough one).

The show tonight (at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre) was incredibly good, but I won't try to recount it because improv never seems as funny when you're describing it after the fact. Suffice it to say, it was well worth the crazy wait outside and the lack of air conditioning.

I saw:

1. an $800 tank top at Barneys
2. an elderly woman with a sexy red leather jacket
3. the Empire State building
4. far fewer people who fit the medical definition of obesity than back home in the portly Midwest (I can see why, what with all the walking that goes on in this city)
5. Grand Central Station
6. a giant button and needle
7. a crapload of moving billboards that stun you just long enough to get steam-rolled by a taxi
Tags: newyork