Day Two in New York

Busy, busy, busy. I’m normally the kind of guy whose social calendar for the year can be written in large print on the back of a postage stamp. I go to work, I go home, on rare occasions I’ll go to a Christmas dinner or birthday party but of late I’ve barely had time to throw eggs at old people or yell obscenities at children, never mind update the blog.

I’ll try to finish off the New York/Boston trip shortly but my heart just won’t be into it since it happened so long ago.

I’ll preface this by saying that Auntie Monkey has a bit of an obsessive personality. The way I like to visit a city is to do a lot of research and mark down anything I think may be of interest and try to group them by area and priority so I can minimize the amount of time wasted looking for stuff. Maybe, it’s actually me that has the obsessive personality. The way Auntie Monkey likes to travel is for me to do a lot of research and mark down anything that may be of interest to her (i.e., any place that sells shoes). Once we get to the city, if it’s on the list, it’s getting a visit, no matter how much time we have, or far away we are or little interest we have in it at the time.

I’ll give you an example. There’s a famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, taken during the filming of The Seven Year Itch. She is standing on a subway grate holding her dress down as it is billows around her. One of the tourist books I was reading mentioned that the grate was located at 52^nd and Lexington (I think, I don’t remember the exact address). I thought, hmm, moderately interesting and marked it down in case we were directly passing it. If we were at 53^rd and Lexington I wasn’t about to walk down to 52^nd to see a grate. Each time we finished a little section we would decide where to go next. Inevitably Monkey would say, what about the subway grate, and I would reply, it’s a little out of the way from here. As in about 40 freakin’ blocks out of the way. When we had finally finished looking at every single woman’s shoe in Manhattan Auntie Monkey said, where to now?

I’m going to give you a little perspective here. Health experts recommend that you walk 10,000 steps a day. This is equivalent to about 5 miles. The day before we had walked 28,000 steps and at this point today we had walked over 31,000 steps (that’s right, I wear a pedometer).

I suggested we go back to the hotel room and get pedicures (because I’m a little fruity at times). She said, how about we go check out the subway grate. Several blood vessels burst in my eyes and just behind my forehead. I calmly explained that there could be nude ballerinas giving away hot caramel sundaes and iPhones there and I still wouldn’t go. I then carved the words out of the page with an exacto knife, set them afire, encased the ashes in concrete and dropped it in the Hudson river. Auntie Monkey then said, does this mean you don’t want to see the subway grate?