Nice weather, sunny, balmy. Spring should be here soon, hopefully, though I liked winter very much, the weather made me very happy. That and, perversely, giving blood. Nothing makes you feel better physically than a good bloodletting. (Don't know what's wrong with me but there we go.)
Been spending my lunches recently with Humzaa and Sharon (and John From My Bus)'s group, alternating with Mary and Joanne's group. Realize it may be sort of loserly hanging out with lowerclassmen but I don't care. Though it may be unwise to make form new social circles in second semester senior year.. you'd think I had the last four years to do it. I don't know if I'd like to be closer friends with these people who are currently on level of "People I Can Talk To About Interesting Things" or if I shouldn't bother. Am currently surveying people, for Zifei's benefit as an animation major tweaking his character designs, of who the hottest male and female cartoon characters are. I will publish the results on here.
Random Hallway Gossip: Apparently Mike Correll has been getting around. If you get my meaning. Well, ast it goes.. "Correll's been making out with.. blah blah blah." To which I respond, "Which Correll?"
Happy days, traumatizing the freshmen!!! ^__^
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
In non New-York News:
1) As of Saturday, we now have Dish Network, since my dad wants to watch the Golf Channel. Which means, for the first time in my life, I have cable.
2) Italian choral concert was kinda blah for me. I came really late (4:40) and paid $8 for a dinner (it would've been $3 if I had made reservations) which I didn't get to finish (to my satisfaction anyway since finishing in all you can eat meals is subjective) before rehearsal, and I didn't get to socialize cuz people were already in rehearsal. Went to rehearsal. Madrigals, Resonance, and Testostertones the stars of the actual show as usual, sounded great, as usual. I didn't really care. We went, I got stuck in the soprano section after intermission despite asking people several times "What voice range are you?" with answers being "Oh, it doesn't matter." Bah. I can't sight-read for shit with singing and rely on listening to other people around me sing, so it didn't work well. Didn't sing/sang soprano part/sang alto badly, meaning all my rehearsal time was worth diddly. Won a "Kinkade print," Moonlit Sleight Ride at the silent auction for $6, then discovered it was basically a piece of cardboard with a pencil sketch over it. (When I think "print" I want like a poster dammit, in all its lovely glossiness.) Bah. Raised money for Italy though. But I'm not going. Bah.
Felt sorry for Malex not selling his dinner, but don't think he can really justify charging $75 for a meal cooked by a high school senior with no reputation, served at his house. It may be inspired by the Inn At Little Venice, but if I were inspired by Jenna Jameson still no one would pay to see me in porn.
3) Blood drive + heavy menstruation = eek.
How bad? Weelllll... I don't believe Pharoah would appreciate me going anywhere near the River Nile in the next few days.
The blood drive was nice though. Not painful or even gross to watch. I was kind of detached from it; I didn't think of it really as my blood, and anyway, it's not like you could really see it graphically squirting all over the inside of the bag, which was the case when I went in for blood testing for the first time, the first time I'd ever had my blood sucked out by a needle. (This was my first time donating, with the chief differences being the forms you fill out and the size of the needle and the amount of blood they take.) Also, the people didn't have to jab me with the needle repeatedly to find my vessels this time either, though they did a lot of Concerned Whispering and poking my inner arm with their fingers looking for a vein. I got light-headed after they finished though and I saw pretty colors. On the plus side, ate lots of tasty shortbread, have free t-shirt and stickers. Got some punariffic stickers orginally, like a sticker with a dalmation saying "I was SPOTTED at the blood drive!!!!!" and then just threw them away because they were too lame to live. Overall though, it makes me feel like a good person. It makes up for me not going to Choral Day, which I was lukewarm about in the first place.
4) I need to reap in my services hours with Archaeology and Concert Choir.
1) As of Saturday, we now have Dish Network, since my dad wants to watch the Golf Channel. Which means, for the first time in my life, I have cable.
2) Italian choral concert was kinda blah for me. I came really late (4:40) and paid $8 for a dinner (it would've been $3 if I had made reservations) which I didn't get to finish (to my satisfaction anyway since finishing in all you can eat meals is subjective) before rehearsal, and I didn't get to socialize cuz people were already in rehearsal. Went to rehearsal. Madrigals, Resonance, and Testostertones the stars of the actual show as usual, sounded great, as usual. I didn't really care. We went, I got stuck in the soprano section after intermission despite asking people several times "What voice range are you?" with answers being "Oh, it doesn't matter." Bah. I can't sight-read for shit with singing and rely on listening to other people around me sing, so it didn't work well. Didn't sing/sang soprano part/sang alto badly, meaning all my rehearsal time was worth diddly. Won a "Kinkade print," Moonlit Sleight Ride at the silent auction for $6, then discovered it was basically a piece of cardboard with a pencil sketch over it. (When I think "print" I want like a poster dammit, in all its lovely glossiness.) Bah. Raised money for Italy though. But I'm not going. Bah.
Felt sorry for Malex not selling his dinner, but don't think he can really justify charging $75 for a meal cooked by a high school senior with no reputation, served at his house. It may be inspired by the Inn At Little Venice, but if I were inspired by Jenna Jameson still no one would pay to see me in porn.
3) Blood drive + heavy menstruation = eek.
How bad? Weelllll... I don't believe Pharoah would appreciate me going anywhere near the River Nile in the next few days.
The blood drive was nice though. Not painful or even gross to watch. I was kind of detached from it; I didn't think of it really as my blood, and anyway, it's not like you could really see it graphically squirting all over the inside of the bag, which was the case when I went in for blood testing for the first time, the first time I'd ever had my blood sucked out by a needle. (This was my first time donating, with the chief differences being the forms you fill out and the size of the needle and the amount of blood they take.) Also, the people didn't have to jab me with the needle repeatedly to find my vessels this time either, though they did a lot of Concerned Whispering and poking my inner arm with their fingers looking for a vein. I got light-headed after they finished though and I saw pretty colors. On the plus side, ate lots of tasty shortbread, have free t-shirt and stickers. Got some punariffic stickers orginally, like a sticker with a dalmation saying "I was SPOTTED at the blood drive!!!!!" and then just threw them away because they were too lame to live. Overall though, it makes me feel like a good person. It makes up for me not going to Choral Day, which I was lukewarm about in the first place.
4) I need to reap in my services hours with Archaeology and Concert Choir.
Monday, March 10, 2003
Friday in New York:
Woke up, before the wake-up call, to find the day cold and clear. Stayed in bed, pleasantly, for 20 minutes before having to actually wake up wake up. Was glad to have a new pair of socks after the wetness of the day before, got dressed, went downstairs. Found Malex, plus Andrew in his Indie hat, Rob, Lizzie, Sarah and Karina and hit the Greek (?) cafe across the street which was not fancy but very filling in the way that solid plain food is. We did some minor souveneir shopping, but didn't find much interesting.
And off to Sony Tech labs, which was extremely trippy. We were inside a sunny public plaza made of granite, which was designed to look like you were outside though you weren't, with high-set skylights and vines and patio furniture, and welcoming robot and a very cool bullet elevator. After waiting in line for a long time, amusing ourselves with rock paper scissors, and then a few badly run games of Animal Vegetable Mineral, we took the elevator up to a dark and star-filled room (really, just wallpapered with black cloth and white pinpoint lights) that led into the exhibits after we "logged in." It took a badly lit photo of us and a voice recording and saved it on our card, so in later exhibits we could manipulate the freakish photo and sound clip. There were some activities inside... saw this short film "Goodnight Tokyo" which existed just to show off their high-definition theater. I was very impressed though. It was all very.. high definition. Me and Rob looked at clips from historically important movies, and went, among other things, on a simulated trip through the digestive system and tried to clean up a simulated oil slick. We were fairly put out to find that the welcoming robot in the plaza was actually controlled by a human ("Nooo! The robot isn't real!!!!"), who looked at the people downstairs through a camera mounted on the robot and talked through a mic. It was fairly lame, aimed for younger children, but presented very well, so that it was a good experience over all.
We went to Times Square, in all its blazing glitz and glory, passing in succession St. Paul's Cathedral, the Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and NBC studios and a street hosting lots of plays which I guess was Broadway but I'm covering my ass if I'm wrong. Times Square is a great place to be in, though it looks more like a triangle. Everything moves and blinks and shines and flashes and glows, and the giant cup of Ramen Noodles really steams and the Nasdaq ticker tape really tickers, red on black, and in general advertising has been elevated to a great artform. It's fantastic. The ground rumbled with the subway below us; if you live in Manhattan you must get used to the rumbling- it was there during the Fed, (I had thought, not seriously, that it must've been like those basement minecarts in Gringotts but turns out I wasn't half wrong) and during dinner the night before. We went shopping at Virgin Records, and ate at an Italian dive off of TS, and went through the nifty revolving doors into the greatest Toys R US in Manhattan, which has an indoor ferris wheel with chaser lights and screaming children. We, unlike last year's class, didn't bump into the Naked Cowboy, but we did encounter two Veg Girls, who, as the giant, lush airbrushed sign hovering above the Square demonstrated, sexy women hired by the PETA to protest meat-eating.. by wearing only strategically placed lettuce. And eating hamburgers, though I didn't think PETA hired them to do that. There were also some camera crews there. We didn't bother them.. much. Some people had their pictures taken with a cop. I didn't find it extraordinary. We also passed a swarm of Musicians on Strike, with signs and picketing in an orderily manner behind a metal fence against/with a group of Spanish instrumentalists playing on the sidewalk. It was amusing, and made national news, as I heard later.
Then, onto the subway, where we couldn't manage to all get on one train, since the doors did close on us. We waited for a while in the rich chords of a guitarist on the opposite platform, who was drowned out every once in a while by passing trains. I would have tossed him money, but my arm was not that good. We got off at the financial district, or fairly close to without the World Trade Center station anymore, and out, in South Side Manhattan where you can see the sea, unblocked by buildings and flat and clear to the horizon. We got to the Commodities Exchange building, waited a while sitting on the window sill when lo and behold, the curtains automatically rose behind us, dazzling us with sunlight. That was our cue to go further in, and we did. We rushed into the bathroom, timing people for the fastest time (39 seconds for the guys, 41 for girls I believe) so we could all have a go. A whirlwind tour of the history of the exchange, with really cheesy plaster reconstructions, and then, the cream of the crop, the ComEx trading floor.
It looked like a 24-hour party. With crowds of people in rainbow colored clothes gathered around pits waving and yelling, and big screen tvs situated all around the trading floor, and index cards being whipped like ninja stars into the pits and the ticker tape racing around the upper edges of the room and numbers and letters flashing on the LCDs. It all became more frantic and wound up as it edged towards closing time, until the horn/bell(?) sounded for closing time and paper burst into the air all around the pits like gunshot confetti at New Years. What a job.
A race, for us, then, through Battery Park (which I'd never seen frosted in snow) so we wouldn't miss our boat. Into the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, where pigeons nested in the lights, and onto the boat, where me and Malex went outside to watch the Manhattan skyline, sans two towers, slide away, and to watch Ellis island and the Statue of Liberty approach us and then pass us by on our right. It was winter, and the seagulls didn't dip and race along the side of the boat as I remembered them doing four years ago. But times are different, anyhow.
As we were approaching Staten island, I snapped a picture of Malex standing on the stairs with the sign reading "No standing on the stairs until ferry has docked," which it hadn't. That's an explanation of the photo for posterity. Just a little joke which no one will ever understand.
And then it was the bus. For "Fletch" and "Men in Black," two lackluster movies, and when we were in Maryland, I was glad to be home.
Woke up, before the wake-up call, to find the day cold and clear. Stayed in bed, pleasantly, for 20 minutes before having to actually wake up wake up. Was glad to have a new pair of socks after the wetness of the day before, got dressed, went downstairs. Found Malex, plus Andrew in his Indie hat, Rob, Lizzie, Sarah and Karina and hit the Greek (?) cafe across the street which was not fancy but very filling in the way that solid plain food is. We did some minor souveneir shopping, but didn't find much interesting.
And off to Sony Tech labs, which was extremely trippy. We were inside a sunny public plaza made of granite, which was designed to look like you were outside though you weren't, with high-set skylights and vines and patio furniture, and welcoming robot and a very cool bullet elevator. After waiting in line for a long time, amusing ourselves with rock paper scissors, and then a few badly run games of Animal Vegetable Mineral, we took the elevator up to a dark and star-filled room (really, just wallpapered with black cloth and white pinpoint lights) that led into the exhibits after we "logged in." It took a badly lit photo of us and a voice recording and saved it on our card, so in later exhibits we could manipulate the freakish photo and sound clip. There were some activities inside... saw this short film "Goodnight Tokyo" which existed just to show off their high-definition theater. I was very impressed though. It was all very.. high definition. Me and Rob looked at clips from historically important movies, and went, among other things, on a simulated trip through the digestive system and tried to clean up a simulated oil slick. We were fairly put out to find that the welcoming robot in the plaza was actually controlled by a human ("Nooo! The robot isn't real!!!!"), who looked at the people downstairs through a camera mounted on the robot and talked through a mic. It was fairly lame, aimed for younger children, but presented very well, so that it was a good experience over all.
We went to Times Square, in all its blazing glitz and glory, passing in succession St. Paul's Cathedral, the Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and NBC studios and a street hosting lots of plays which I guess was Broadway but I'm covering my ass if I'm wrong. Times Square is a great place to be in, though it looks more like a triangle. Everything moves and blinks and shines and flashes and glows, and the giant cup of Ramen Noodles really steams and the Nasdaq ticker tape really tickers, red on black, and in general advertising has been elevated to a great artform. It's fantastic. The ground rumbled with the subway below us; if you live in Manhattan you must get used to the rumbling- it was there during the Fed, (I had thought, not seriously, that it must've been like those basement minecarts in Gringotts but turns out I wasn't half wrong) and during dinner the night before. We went shopping at Virgin Records, and ate at an Italian dive off of TS, and went through the nifty revolving doors into the greatest Toys R US in Manhattan, which has an indoor ferris wheel with chaser lights and screaming children. We, unlike last year's class, didn't bump into the Naked Cowboy, but we did encounter two Veg Girls, who, as the giant, lush airbrushed sign hovering above the Square demonstrated, sexy women hired by the PETA to protest meat-eating.. by wearing only strategically placed lettuce. And eating hamburgers, though I didn't think PETA hired them to do that. There were also some camera crews there. We didn't bother them.. much. Some people had their pictures taken with a cop. I didn't find it extraordinary. We also passed a swarm of Musicians on Strike, with signs and picketing in an orderily manner behind a metal fence against/with a group of Spanish instrumentalists playing on the sidewalk. It was amusing, and made national news, as I heard later.
Then, onto the subway, where we couldn't manage to all get on one train, since the doors did close on us. We waited for a while in the rich chords of a guitarist on the opposite platform, who was drowned out every once in a while by passing trains. I would have tossed him money, but my arm was not that good. We got off at the financial district, or fairly close to without the World Trade Center station anymore, and out, in South Side Manhattan where you can see the sea, unblocked by buildings and flat and clear to the horizon. We got to the Commodities Exchange building, waited a while sitting on the window sill when lo and behold, the curtains automatically rose behind us, dazzling us with sunlight. That was our cue to go further in, and we did. We rushed into the bathroom, timing people for the fastest time (39 seconds for the guys, 41 for girls I believe) so we could all have a go. A whirlwind tour of the history of the exchange, with really cheesy plaster reconstructions, and then, the cream of the crop, the ComEx trading floor.
It looked like a 24-hour party. With crowds of people in rainbow colored clothes gathered around pits waving and yelling, and big screen tvs situated all around the trading floor, and index cards being whipped like ninja stars into the pits and the ticker tape racing around the upper edges of the room and numbers and letters flashing on the LCDs. It all became more frantic and wound up as it edged towards closing time, until the horn/bell(?) sounded for closing time and paper burst into the air all around the pits like gunshot confetti at New Years. What a job.
A race, for us, then, through Battery Park (which I'd never seen frosted in snow) so we wouldn't miss our boat. Into the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, where pigeons nested in the lights, and onto the boat, where me and Malex went outside to watch the Manhattan skyline, sans two towers, slide away, and to watch Ellis island and the Statue of Liberty approach us and then pass us by on our right. It was winter, and the seagulls didn't dip and race along the side of the boat as I remembered them doing four years ago. But times are different, anyhow.
As we were approaching Staten island, I snapped a picture of Malex standing on the stairs with the sign reading "No standing on the stairs until ferry has docked," which it hadn't. That's an explanation of the photo for posterity. Just a little joke which no one will ever understand.
And then it was the bus. For "Fletch" and "Men in Black," two lackluster movies, and when we were in Maryland, I was glad to be home.
Sunday, March 09, 2003
Thursday in New York: A Blog in the Form of Edited AIM Transcript.
shpachee: how was ny
SFX 87: great.
shpachee: tell me about it
SFX 87: I dunno what to say. You need to see Blue Man Group. they really kickass. I mean they really kickass.
shpachee: you've seen them live?
SFX 87: YAH.
shpachee: WHOAAAA
SFX 87: DUDE.
shpachee: DUUUUUDE
SFX 87: YAH.
shpachee: what did they do
SFX 87: DUDE WELL..they had glow in the dark paint in their drums so when they hit it it'd go FOOOSH and they played plastic tubes.. and we played with toilet paper, which was really fun. like they turned on the black lights so the toilet paper was glowing, and they had like four rolls attached to this balcony and people in the back grabbed it and would pass it on to the people in front of them so there would be like these giant glowing globs of toilet paper converging on you.
(editing note: We also wore protective ponchos, in the front row against squirting banana cream, which glowed purple in the light, and there were rotating glowing plastic tubes above us, and plastic glowing tubes with water-tornadoes. Very trippy.)
shpachee: yeah i've seen them do the drum/paint thing lol!
SFC 87: but also they had the strobe light on so I'd miss the toilet paper sometimes..and the music was rilly great. it was very ravery. I wasn't expecting it to be ravery.. I thought it'd be kinda new-age like those intel commercials.
but it wasn't. It was ravery. With lots of glowy things. it was trippy. i guess it sounds kinda stupid when I talk about it. I mean, they had various sketches and stuff too
Like comedy skits in between. They wouldn't talk but they wore LCD screens on their backs with dialogue which doesn't sound exciting, but they were funny.
shpachee: oooh@
SFX 87: also, they took a dude and strapped him by his legs and painted him blue and swung him by a rope so that he smacked this giant piece of canvas and made a living painting.
shpachee: ooh i've seen that before too. i keep seeing blue mans gorup on tv. oit's great. i think when they did that on tv though. they used a celebrity
SFX 87: yah. I saw it on tv so I didn't find it that exciting
shpachee: ohh
shpachee: yeha i think they should come up with new things to do cuz it just sounds like the same things i saw back like two years ago or osomethin
SFX 87: like with the skits they had three posters, and the posters would say 'pick a poster to read and stick with it' and every five seconds or so they'd flip the page (cuz it was like a giant notepad but with posters)
shpachee: LOL
SFX 87: so that there'd be no way you could read all three posters at the ssame time
shpachee: hey do they talk EVER
SFX 87: and the posters would say things like "don't you know that the time you've spent reading this poster could be spent on other posters" or "the odds you've read only this one poster for the last 5 rounds is 4441515 to 1"
SFX 87: no, they don't. they seemed really anti-internet though in the skits that had a point but they did it in a good way. oh, and they had little video clips and stuff too.
like they'd mix their musical pieces with comedy skits and random video clips.
shpachee: ohh i haven't se nthose but why were you guys seeing them anways
SFX 87: no reason.
shpachee: was it supposed to be educational or something
SFX 87: no, but it was at 7 at night anyhoo. we spent all our school hours being edumacational. we visited the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York vice president of the bank talked to us.
(editing note: The Bank impressed me immensely. Though I live in a suburban bubble in the richest county in America, and am used to luxury, indulgence and comfort, am not at all accustomed to grandeur and gravitas. I don't know very much about economics, but spent my time in awe at the architecture and interior design, looking at the bronze classical statue of a man with a lyre, the oak conference table and paneled woodwork and leather chairs with brass studs in it, and the gothic ceiling vaults with their chained medievalist chandeliers in wrought iron [the massive amount of chains and chandeliers and spiked gates made me comment to Malex that the bank looked like an S&M dungeon, causing HIM to make a rather horrid pun about bondage... get it..? Bondage... gah. On the plus side, during the tour I got my little "briquette" of shredded money as a souveneir. I thought it was neat.)
We got to look at this dumb exhibit on the history of coins. Actually, it was pretty cool, but dumb compared to blue man group.
(editing note: Educational fact of the day - coins were historically made through casts or stamps, aka mints. Casts, like in China, allowed for much faster coinage but wasted more metal. I thought it was nifty how historical coins could be like giant plates, or really really thin. Or really really weird, like shell shaped coins, or giant stone coins.)
and we got to look at their shitload of gold they kept in the basement that made me flip out. I was like.. "goooollld! goolllld!!!" cuz like ONE bar was worth like several million dollars you know? I scratched some bars with my nails but it just broke my nails. cuz the VP dude was joking "you should scratch the bars with your nails and see if you can get gold dust" and I thought it was worth a try. But gold's not as soft as it's all cracked up to be. anyhow, they're really accurate in weighing the things anyhow.
(editing note: I was actually fairly numb to all the gold initially when we went five stories down from ground level to the basement, because it just looked like so many piles of shiny yellow bricks it didn't really register. I actually thought it looked kind of fake, though I knew it was real... but I could reach through the metal grate and touch it, which is when I flipped out.)
shpachee: LOL that's awesome. so how much gold was there really? you know gold is soft, meaning it's bendable
SFX 87: hum. More than Fort Knox. But it's not all our gold see. A lot of it belongs to other countries. yeah. but not softer than my fingernails unfortunately
shpachee: not that it's gonna scratch off
SFX 87: right. the dudes who work there have to wear these magnesium shoes so if they drop the gold while they're transporting it they don't like.. break their toes. "AUGH MY FOOT!"
(editing note: Magnesium! Lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel... better than mithril, and burns dramatically... *notescribble*.. v. good fantasy metal. Shall be, in fiction, forging magic swords out of it real soon. I also thought it would suck to work in the Fed vault.. I mean, you spend all your time handling gazillions of dollars and then you go home every Friday with your minimum wage check.)
SFX 87: Also. The door to the vault is 8 feet thick steel. I was wondering how they'd do that.
(editing note: I was contemplating to Andrew the idea of seperated shifting plates, since he'd brought up that 8 feet of steel is impossible to manipulate all at once, and must be made of plates fused together. Funner idea: seperated shifting plates that open vertically... so that when the vault door closes, it slams into the ground like a portcullis. Pity the man trapped under that.)
But what it was was.. it was this giant metal cylinder with a passage through it. So to let people through they'd rotate the cylinder so that the passage would match up between the door leading into the vault and the door leading out.
(/end convo)
Ingenious. So, how was my day?
To begin again...
It started with a long, four hour busride, sitting with Rob watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (which traumatized me as a kid with the melting-skull-Nazi). He industriously finished Farewell to Arms. It did not prevent him from asking finicky questions like, "Why are the snakes still alive in the pit after having been buried for the last 3000 years?" I suggested reproduction and then subsequent cannabalism, but anyhow. Raiders. Good movie. Bad Nazis. We drove past Ground Zero. I had thought it was a parking lot until it was pointed out, so there wasn't as much emotional impact as I thought there would be. We had a very rushed lunch at Southstreet Seaport, very much like Baltimore's, and were sent out into the driving snow along Wall Street, humming the Indiana Jones theme around Andrew who had the misfortune of wearing an Indie hat. It was a dumb joke that would last both days.
Up north, snow was aggressive and stung our faces. It was very angry snow and it hurt. After hitting the Fed, we invaded a Starbucks, then Trinity Church, a beautiful, peaceful place that was once the tallest building in New York, though now it's dwarfed by other things. Both Lizzie and I remembered it from Time and Again, and I from my eighth grade New York trip. Going inside and looking up between the tree-like columns (a throwback to paganism, Andrew noted, apologizing in advance for blasphemy) made it feel like the tallest building again. We looked at baptismal fonts, stained glass, chapels and statuary, all under an aegis of serenity. Outside, there were old, snow-dusted gravestones we could hardly read ("Here Lies William... who?") through the bars of the fence (the graveyard was closed to visitors). We were late to meet up with the rest of the groups because we'd misheard the times so they were mad at us for making them wait in the cold. It was the only time church has ever made me late for anything.
We took the metro (subway) to Grenwich Village, trekking through slush. No one was in the mood for shopping, so we dived into the NYU law school bookstore to do some reading and were quickly bored. We plopped down at a cafe down the street the clerk recommended and camped there, reading the Times for about an hour before dinner.
Dinner at the Times Cafe (elsewhere). A very calm.. relaxing.. BIG.. (too much) dinner with an entire group of friends. (Malex, Andrew, Rob, Sarah G, Karina, Lizzie). We took two hours. It was very nice, and something I think we ought to do more often.
Then.. Blue Man Group... then.. the hotel, a shower, Rob telling me that everyone in his room was busy getting ready for bed and to please stop harassing him at night, me rooming with random people who wouldn't shut up and let me (or the people next door) sleep, and then bed, and then unconsciousness.
Good night, good night. Sweet dreams to the sound of traffic.
shpachee: how was ny
SFX 87: great.
shpachee: tell me about it
SFX 87: I dunno what to say. You need to see Blue Man Group. they really kickass. I mean they really kickass.
shpachee: you've seen them live?
SFX 87: YAH.
shpachee: WHOAAAA
SFX 87: DUDE.
shpachee: DUUUUUDE
SFX 87: YAH.
shpachee: what did they do
SFX 87: DUDE WELL..they had glow in the dark paint in their drums so when they hit it it'd go FOOOSH and they played plastic tubes.. and we played with toilet paper, which was really fun. like they turned on the black lights so the toilet paper was glowing, and they had like four rolls attached to this balcony and people in the back grabbed it and would pass it on to the people in front of them so there would be like these giant glowing globs of toilet paper converging on you.
(editing note: We also wore protective ponchos, in the front row against squirting banana cream, which glowed purple in the light, and there were rotating glowing plastic tubes above us, and plastic glowing tubes with water-tornadoes. Very trippy.)
shpachee: yeah i've seen them do the drum/paint thing lol!
SFC 87: but also they had the strobe light on so I'd miss the toilet paper sometimes..and the music was rilly great. it was very ravery. I wasn't expecting it to be ravery.. I thought it'd be kinda new-age like those intel commercials.
but it wasn't. It was ravery. With lots of glowy things. it was trippy. i guess it sounds kinda stupid when I talk about it. I mean, they had various sketches and stuff too
Like comedy skits in between. They wouldn't talk but they wore LCD screens on their backs with dialogue which doesn't sound exciting, but they were funny.
shpachee: oooh@
SFX 87: also, they took a dude and strapped him by his legs and painted him blue and swung him by a rope so that he smacked this giant piece of canvas and made a living painting.
shpachee: ooh i've seen that before too. i keep seeing blue mans gorup on tv. oit's great. i think when they did that on tv though. they used a celebrity
SFX 87: yah. I saw it on tv so I didn't find it that exciting
shpachee: ohh
shpachee: yeha i think they should come up with new things to do cuz it just sounds like the same things i saw back like two years ago or osomethin
SFX 87: like with the skits they had three posters, and the posters would say 'pick a poster to read and stick with it' and every five seconds or so they'd flip the page (cuz it was like a giant notepad but with posters)
shpachee: LOL
SFX 87: so that there'd be no way you could read all three posters at the ssame time
shpachee: hey do they talk EVER
SFX 87: and the posters would say things like "don't you know that the time you've spent reading this poster could be spent on other posters" or "the odds you've read only this one poster for the last 5 rounds is 4441515 to 1"
SFX 87: no, they don't. they seemed really anti-internet though in the skits that had a point but they did it in a good way. oh, and they had little video clips and stuff too.
like they'd mix their musical pieces with comedy skits and random video clips.
shpachee: ohh i haven't se nthose but why were you guys seeing them anways
SFX 87: no reason.
shpachee: was it supposed to be educational or something
SFX 87: no, but it was at 7 at night anyhoo. we spent all our school hours being edumacational. we visited the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York vice president of the bank talked to us.
(editing note: The Bank impressed me immensely. Though I live in a suburban bubble in the richest county in America, and am used to luxury, indulgence and comfort, am not at all accustomed to grandeur and gravitas. I don't know very much about economics, but spent my time in awe at the architecture and interior design, looking at the bronze classical statue of a man with a lyre, the oak conference table and paneled woodwork and leather chairs with brass studs in it, and the gothic ceiling vaults with their chained medievalist chandeliers in wrought iron [the massive amount of chains and chandeliers and spiked gates made me comment to Malex that the bank looked like an S&M dungeon, causing HIM to make a rather horrid pun about bondage... get it..? Bondage... gah. On the plus side, during the tour I got my little "briquette" of shredded money as a souveneir. I thought it was neat.)
We got to look at this dumb exhibit on the history of coins. Actually, it was pretty cool, but dumb compared to blue man group.
(editing note: Educational fact of the day - coins were historically made through casts or stamps, aka mints. Casts, like in China, allowed for much faster coinage but wasted more metal. I thought it was nifty how historical coins could be like giant plates, or really really thin. Or really really weird, like shell shaped coins, or giant stone coins.)
and we got to look at their shitload of gold they kept in the basement that made me flip out. I was like.. "goooollld! goolllld!!!" cuz like ONE bar was worth like several million dollars you know? I scratched some bars with my nails but it just broke my nails. cuz the VP dude was joking "you should scratch the bars with your nails and see if you can get gold dust" and I thought it was worth a try. But gold's not as soft as it's all cracked up to be. anyhow, they're really accurate in weighing the things anyhow.
(editing note: I was actually fairly numb to all the gold initially when we went five stories down from ground level to the basement, because it just looked like so many piles of shiny yellow bricks it didn't really register. I actually thought it looked kind of fake, though I knew it was real... but I could reach through the metal grate and touch it, which is when I flipped out.)
shpachee: LOL that's awesome. so how much gold was there really? you know gold is soft, meaning it's bendable
SFX 87: hum. More than Fort Knox. But it's not all our gold see. A lot of it belongs to other countries. yeah. but not softer than my fingernails unfortunately
shpachee: not that it's gonna scratch off
SFX 87: right. the dudes who work there have to wear these magnesium shoes so if they drop the gold while they're transporting it they don't like.. break their toes. "AUGH MY FOOT!"
(editing note: Magnesium! Lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel... better than mithril, and burns dramatically... *notescribble*.. v. good fantasy metal. Shall be, in fiction, forging magic swords out of it real soon. I also thought it would suck to work in the Fed vault.. I mean, you spend all your time handling gazillions of dollars and then you go home every Friday with your minimum wage check.)
SFX 87: Also. The door to the vault is 8 feet thick steel. I was wondering how they'd do that.
(editing note: I was contemplating to Andrew the idea of seperated shifting plates, since he'd brought up that 8 feet of steel is impossible to manipulate all at once, and must be made of plates fused together. Funner idea: seperated shifting plates that open vertically... so that when the vault door closes, it slams into the ground like a portcullis. Pity the man trapped under that.)
But what it was was.. it was this giant metal cylinder with a passage through it. So to let people through they'd rotate the cylinder so that the passage would match up between the door leading into the vault and the door leading out.
(/end convo)
Ingenious. So, how was my day?
To begin again...
It started with a long, four hour busride, sitting with Rob watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (which traumatized me as a kid with the melting-skull-Nazi). He industriously finished Farewell to Arms. It did not prevent him from asking finicky questions like, "Why are the snakes still alive in the pit after having been buried for the last 3000 years?" I suggested reproduction and then subsequent cannabalism, but anyhow. Raiders. Good movie. Bad Nazis. We drove past Ground Zero. I had thought it was a parking lot until it was pointed out, so there wasn't as much emotional impact as I thought there would be. We had a very rushed lunch at Southstreet Seaport, very much like Baltimore's, and were sent out into the driving snow along Wall Street, humming the Indiana Jones theme around Andrew who had the misfortune of wearing an Indie hat. It was a dumb joke that would last both days.
Up north, snow was aggressive and stung our faces. It was very angry snow and it hurt. After hitting the Fed, we invaded a Starbucks, then Trinity Church, a beautiful, peaceful place that was once the tallest building in New York, though now it's dwarfed by other things. Both Lizzie and I remembered it from Time and Again, and I from my eighth grade New York trip. Going inside and looking up between the tree-like columns (a throwback to paganism, Andrew noted, apologizing in advance for blasphemy) made it feel like the tallest building again. We looked at baptismal fonts, stained glass, chapels and statuary, all under an aegis of serenity. Outside, there were old, snow-dusted gravestones we could hardly read ("Here Lies William... who?") through the bars of the fence (the graveyard was closed to visitors). We were late to meet up with the rest of the groups because we'd misheard the times so they were mad at us for making them wait in the cold. It was the only time church has ever made me late for anything.
We took the metro (subway) to Grenwich Village, trekking through slush. No one was in the mood for shopping, so we dived into the NYU law school bookstore to do some reading and were quickly bored. We plopped down at a cafe down the street the clerk recommended and camped there, reading the Times for about an hour before dinner.
Dinner at the Times Cafe (elsewhere). A very calm.. relaxing.. BIG.. (too much) dinner with an entire group of friends. (Malex, Andrew, Rob, Sarah G, Karina, Lizzie). We took two hours. It was very nice, and something I think we ought to do more often.
Then.. Blue Man Group... then.. the hotel, a shower, Rob telling me that everyone in his room was busy getting ready for bed and to please stop harassing him at night, me rooming with random people who wouldn't shut up and let me (or the people next door) sleep, and then bed, and then unconsciousness.
Good night, good night. Sweet dreams to the sound of traffic.
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