But whoever said I was normal?

Normally, when I go on vacation and have a really great time, the first thing I do when I get back is clean up my six thousand or so photos (thank you, Photoshop) and post them on the internet for all to mock. Then the second thing I do is write about it here.

So, since I didn’t immediately sit down to my computer and type out a few words after my trip to New York over Spring Break, but instead sat on my lazy arse and did nothing but watch movies for the rest of my school-free days, Martha totally called me on it. She’s all like, why aren’t you posting? If I can find the time between my Microbiology midterm and my three other exams to blog for the world, so can you.

You can basically say that she’s guilted me into this. That damn girl and all her peer pressure…

Now, where was I? Ah, yes, New York. Two weekends ago, I was in New York. The basic outline went a little like this:

Friday: arrive way too early to hang out with my girls and spend a couple hours wandering around the West Side waterfront, talking to my mom and reading Becoming Jane Austen, before meeting with one Dave “I’ve got a new job that includes – get this! – benefits!!” K. for lunch. Eat at Chelsea Market, and have some non-Jewish stranger butt into our conversation because I couldn’t remember the word “yenta” (yeah, who knew I could work that into conversation?) and then call Dave out for not being Jewish enough to remember it himself. Then said stranger immediately begins making out with his girlfriend. Totally awesome lunchtime entertainment.
Then Dave shows me his cubicle in one building, and the front door of his office in the company’s other building. I saw walls made out of hockey pucks and tennis balls. And then I see how adorable Dave is, because he wallpapered his cubicle with pictures of his Penn friends. Awwwwww…

Pick up Mel at Penn Station and cab our way to Estee’s place. Eat again, this time at Café Arte, where one kid butts into our private conversation about Batman and then pukes in his napkin, and another kid stands behind Mel and Estee, staring vacantly at a mural on the wall behind our table. She doesn’t even respond when I start talking to her. Very weird, but didn’t even remotely slow down our eating of all things Italian and drinking of all things wine.

Saturday: beginning of the end for all the edible cheese of Manhattan. Eat cheese for breakfast. Stand in TKTS line, pass on partially obstructed views of Spring Awakening, and let Mel talk us into A Chorus Line. Eat at Juniors for second breakfast (yes, we’re hobbits). Have cheesy grits. Yum. Play at Dave & Buster’s – both Mel and Estee kick my sorry bum at the basketball game, we all score some major ticketage at the trivia game, I royally suck at skeeball, Estee and I are amused by Mel’s dance/stomp moves, and then we turn in our apparently miniscule number of tickets to get two Care Bears for Estee’s twin cousins. Then I watch Estee, who clearly works too much, sleep through A Chorus Line. But she tells me she loved it. Mel sings songs from A Chorus Line for the rest of the weekend.
Next we attempt to find this wine bar in Estee’s neighborhood by calling the concierge at one of the Times Square hotels that Mel has pre-programmed into her phone. As expected, without knowing the name or location of said establishment, we and our new concierge friend are completely unsuccessful. However, Estee saves the day by using her Blackberry for good. We find a great place on West 54th called Casellula’s, where we feast on (you guessed it) cheese, meats, beet salad, and wine. It was glorious.
Our evening was spent making fun of Mel for her crush on Daniel Radcliffe while watching Harry Potter 5. Oh yeah, and eating cheese pizza from this awesome pizza parlour across the street from Estee’s apartment (Estee, you SO need to send me the name of that place so I can tell all my friends about it).

Sunday: Our only reason for climbing out of bed was to eat brunch at Josie’s (well, Estee had Hebrew lessons, too, so she got up at the buttcrack of dawn – ON A SUNDAY). Mel and I are mysteriously the only people to arrive on time (15 minutes early if it must be known) for a one-o’clock brunch. Knowing that Josie’s doesn’t take reservations, we (wrongly) assumed that everyone would be on time to get a table – because they don’t seat parties until everyone has arrived. So Estee makes it to the restaurant around 1ish, but the boys, well, they weren’t even close. Jordan was fifteen minutes late, and just as we convinced the waitress to seat us at 1:30PM even though we weren’t all there, our own little New York socialite, David R., makes an appearance. Apparently the party was ready to start.
I think we gave Estee the best brunch of her life, because our conversation broke all barriers of the PC world. We talked religion, politics, and racism. The racism comes in when we learned that Mel’s law school actually makes minority students take a type of Ms. Manners course. She tried to explain it to be far less prejudicial, and claim all sorts of excuses on their behalf, but we find it really adorable that her school wants her to fit in so much that they’re willing to teach her how to wash her hands before eating and other such handy tidbits. In fact, she even taught us a thing or two about “work hugs” and the “work kiss.” I don’t know what these things are, but I think it’s safe to say that the “work kiss” is something that my boss would make up just so he could touch the female employees without getting fired. It’s a dirty, dirty world, my friends. And don’t you even try to think otherwise.
Post meal – which for me included homemade oatmeal (I dedicated my breakfast to you, Martha!) – Jordan escorted us to Zabar’s, where we bought (surprise!) cheese and bread for our afternoon of George Clooney. Cuz that’s right, boys and girls, we ditched Jordan after the wine shop and spent the rest of the evening watching Ocean’s 13 and Michael Clayton. Part of the evening also included playing such games as Six Degrees of George Clooney (Mel can get there in only TWO setps!). Then we ordered another cheese pizza from the awesomest pizza parlour in all of NYC. (Yeah, I said it. Go ahead and try to prove me wrong.)

Monday: Mel (I take no credit for this) convinces Estee to go into work even later than the 10AM time she already expected. Mel eats more cheese for pre-breakfast, to kind of line her stomach for the greasy goodness to follow. Cuz we ate at some diner a block away from Estee’s apartment. This is where we learn all about Estee’s pro bono political asylum case. This is the kind of thing that makes me even remotely interested in that whole lawyering business. You can actually do SOME GOOD in the world with that law degree. Amazing stuff really.
Estee and I also discovered that the skills I developed when conducting criminal investigations for the State Department overlap with the skills she’s developing as a lawyer. I wonder if she’s heard of the READ technique for interviewing…? Anyway, that was a cool discovery.
Like the two proud mommas we are, Mel and I then helped Estee onto a bus and stood on the sidewalk waving until a) Estee noticed we were still there, and b) the bus drove out of sight.
Then it was back to Penn Station for the train-ride home. Mel and I hung out under the arrival/departure sign until her train prepared to board and we had to say goodbye. And I heard her cry, ‘ere she drove out of sight, Merry Spring Break to you and to all a good night!

*****
Had I known I was going to lay like a vegetable for the rest of Spring Break and not get any of the papers done for school that I planned, I would have staid in New York longer. Instead, I sat around waiting for Comcast to fix my DVR (which suddenly stopped showing a picture for any of our recordings, and which I furthermore fixed myself becaue Comcast was apparently too busy to bother showing up for any of our appointments), watching movies, playing with the dog, celebrating Marilyn’s first annual 29th birthday, catching a stupendously spontaneous dinner with Jeff and Liz (we didn’t even have to plan it out three months in advance), and cooking Andrew a nice, traditional St. Paddy’s Day dinner (which, by the way, he totally failed to mention in his Georgetown blog; I feel so snubbed).

This week has therefore been a round of catch-up at school. Things are going well enough, but I really have to get cracking on some of those papers that will start raining down on me hard and fast in the next couple of weeks.

At the same time, Anthony’s dad is training up to DC from Charlotte today so we have company for the weekend. If you’re in the area, and you’ve always wondered where Anthony got his strong, masculine build from, this is the weekend to drop by my place. Otherwise, I will be hiding in the coldest, darkest, dankest, quietest hole, madly dashing out papers and presentations.