Home. Phil’s making chicken tacos and I’m downloading all the pictures off my camera onto the computer. I had a really good time. Bought lots of frivolous things I would normally not touch: Aveda lip gloss, shampoo and conditioner; $1 books from Strand by authors I don’t really know anything about; a chocolate sundae from Cozy Soup and Burger. Took more than 200 pictures. Don’t worry. I won’t post them all.
+Wednesday+ I hung out with Phil and ran errands before picking Melissa up to head to the airport at 4. Our 5:50 flight was delayed for 48 minutes, making it impossible to catch our connecting flight in Washington. United’s incredibly crappy ticket counter lady finally got us an 8 o’clock flight on American Airlines. Amber, Joey and I tooled around Opry Mills until we had to come back. We were all forced through the bin Laden line, and had everything with us put on a table and searched. We had to take our shoes off and let the security guards run wands over us and pat us down several times. They took Amber’s mace. Then the flight was delayed again. We got to New York barely before midnight. Our hotel, the Royalton, was swank. It was all avant garde, and all these skinny model types were in the lounge drinking $15 cosmopolitans.
+Thursday+ Kristin, Amanda, Amber and I went to the MOMA. It was smaller than I imagined, but I saw plenty of good art. There was a visiting exhibition by Dieter Roth, who liked to throw plates and food under plexiglass and frame it when it got good and moldy. He also made sculptures out of chocolate and painted different things over duplicates of the same photo. There were other works by Warhol, Matisse and more. I took pictures. Then we went and hoofed around Chinatown. I bought a tote bag for Cheryl and a ring for myself. We walked around the Village for a bit. That night, the whole group (minus one) met Patrick’s friend Aaron at a bar called Revelation. We got pretty tanked. My tab was $80.
+Friday+ I went to a design session headed by Ron Johnson, the adviser to the Kansas State Collegian and editor of SND’s Best of Newspaper Design 23 and 24. I didn’t really learn anything I didn’t already know. Then I waited out in the hall and listened to some woman tell me that freelancing is tough. Hooty hoo, thanks for the tip. The gals and Joey and I ate at a nice Italian restaurant, though the fetuccini wasn’t that good. Spent the night in the room, tired.
+Saturday+ Listened to a writer for the Daily Show tell the crowd that comedy writing rocks, but it’s nearly impossible to break into. You have to know someone. I don’t know anyone. We went to the Empire State Building. The wait was more than two hours in a tight hallway where stale air merely circulated the body odor and fart smell. We were at the top for 10 minutes. It was nice outside when we entered the building, but when we got to the top, it had gotten really cold and foggy and had started raining. That night, we all went out to the Cozy Soup and Burger, and hooped it up for an hour or two.
We tried to find a bar to accommodate 11 of us, but everyone but Patrick, Amber and I ended up going back to the hotel room to start drinking. The three of us got a little tipsy at some place called Mercury Bar, then went back to the hotel room with everyone else and had a drunken, fun time. I even drank a beer. I hate beer.
+Sunday+ I paid for my transgressions Saturday night. We had to get up and get out of the hotel, though my flight didn’t leave until 5. Amber, Joey and I walked around and shopped a bit. We saw a pigeon that had an egg stuck to its rear. It was pitiful and couldn’t walk right. I bought three books from the Strand for a dollar each: Patchwork by Karen Osborn, A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks, and Lesbian Mothers’ Legal Handbook (which I will donate to my Lesbian Studies professor for future usage in that class). The flight back was nice. We had a two-hour layover in Chicago at O’Hare, which is a swanky airport. There’s this trippy tunnel with all these neon lights everywhere to distract you from your jetlag. I got home at 12:30 a.m. today. I missed Phil and the ferrets. My clothes all smell like fish and exhaust and dirty subway water. It’s good to be home.
I’ll be posting a ton of photos to the photo section as soon as I can.