p.s.

my good blogmate has already told you about our adventures in new york. now that we're back in what suddenly feels like quaint little chicago, i just wanted to reassure our readership that we did more than just drink and shop. we learned things about one of this nation's great cities...

1. in bars on wall street, the line to the mens' room is longer than the womens' - but ladies' night somehow seems creepier in that context.
2. tequila in hot chocolate is delicious.
3. if you do not speak english as your native language, it is apparently acceptable to sing along to bryan adams in the airport.
4. if you are a do-gooder vegan undergraduate at columbia, it is totally acceptable to go on in long strident tones over ethiopian food with your girlfriend and your tragically-new-jersey-accented aunt about what a do-gooder you are, and how much your expensive columbia education will go to bat for you in the lucrative and competitive field of designing programs for disabled adults.
5. if you are the tragically-new-jersey-accented aunt at said ethiopian restaurant, yes, we want to hear you speaking so loudly, and of course we are interested in that time in the 70s when you went on some macrobiotic diet without actually knowing what that meant.
6. if you are riding the m60 bus from la guardia to harlem, not only is it standard for the bus driver to holler at you over the loudspeaker, but it is required that you shout back, in kind of a warped tent revival fashion: "is there room in the back?" "NO!!!" "i SAID, can you give me some roomintheback, people?" "NO!" there might have been dancing and speaking in tongues but it seemed dangerous given the amount of slamming on the brakes.
7. if you are a featured artist at moma, you need to wear high-watered bad pants. incidentally, you know that usual museum commentary on the wall about how the artist develops his work by "listening" to what the inanimate subjects are telling him? not so mystical and artistic, once you know that said artist is schizophrenic.

so a special set of thank-yous to our gracious hosts who showed us around new york!

-sm, for uncomplainingly ushering us around the city, even on a sunday morning after her saturday evening of mainlining wine.
-js, for getting us successfully from point a to point b every time, and for boiling down complicated concepts like arbitrage to little words that us non-business types can understand (when she described someone's business plan as a "bank of a bank of a bank," we knew we'd found the right friend.)
-sm's roommate k, for showing off her new alcoholic popsicles, and insisting that it's really ok to want fries and ice cream right after breakfast. also for agreeing that no, falafel cannot be involved in arbitrage, because it's a low-risk commodity.
-mk, for navigating us through dim sum: "you just sit there until you're full, or until you're peckish, and then you eat some more!" for finding us lots of yummy food and drink, and appreciating my long rambling stories about people she's never met.

and of course, to my blogmate, for one-liners like "sometimes we pass zantac wordlessly back and forth like a bong," for completely forgetting that it was my idea to embark on the crazy let's-give-up-our-plane-seats-for-$400 adventure in the first place and not holding it against me, and for being willing to laugh about this and still tolerate my presence after it's over.