A Lefty Writes

Well, I'm back from New York. I wrote some thoughts down during the trip in the hopes of posting while there but never had a chance to do it. The trip was awesome. It was great to see everyone, and I enjoyed being back east for a few days. So here are my musings while in "the city."

Thoughts from 30,000 Feet
1. Richard Marx has a new album out. I didn't know he was still alive.
2. American Airlines Flight #242 should be titled "Cranky Baby Express."
3. But on the plus side, "Harry Potter's Escape from Azkaban" is our in-flight movie.
4. Flying over middle-America is very cool. It's easy to forget that there's so much land between the coasts. Well, not so easy when you're on a 6-hour flight, but easy the rest of the time. It's very cool to look down one minute and see mountains and ten minutes later there are vast fields of... something or other, all checker-boarded across the landscape.
5. The food on American is pretty good. Though I can't understand why the "Olive Oil & Vinegar" salad dressing had to have "nonfat milk solids" in it. And lettuce with a few carrot strips doesn't count as a salad. But other than that, quite good. For airline food, at least.

Day 1: An adventure in wet
At first I was excited. It's been literally over six months since I've seen rain, so when I woke up this morning to showers and clouds I was thinking about how refreshing and new it was, not what it would be like to walk around all day in it.

I quickly realized the error of my ways, though. By the time I made it to Starbucks this morning I was thoroughly soaked. I'd taken my raincoat with me, but that did little to aid my shoes and pants. It let up every once in a while and I found respite in restaurants and coffeeshops, but on the whole it was very, very wet.

I also remembered that I have absolutely no sense of direction in New York. In most cities I'm great, but when I emerge from the subway I couldn't tell you which way is up, much less east, west, north or south. At one point I was trying to cross the park from east to west. I started at 85th St. & 5th Ave, on the east side. When I emerged from the park, I found myself at 77th St. & 5th Ave, still on the east side. I still have no idea when or where I got completely turned around. But there you go.

Rain and lack of direction aside, today was awesome. I'm so glad I took this trip. It feels great to get out of LA for a few days and even better to see people, some of whom I haven't seen since I graduated from college. I've spent a good part of the day working out my schedule for the rest of my time here. It's difficult to plan a trip like this because you don't want to over-extend yourself and end up seeing people for 30-minute blocks, but just the same you don't want to under-plan and end up with days where you have nothing to do. I think I've struck a good balance, but we'll see how it goes.

Acappellinteresting
Tonight was the "SA reunion dinner," which meant a group of seven SA alumni meeting at a restaurant and joking around for a while. This was quite the event. We had people ranging from class of '00 to '04, and (the funny part) more exes than you could count on, well, on half a hand. Not all of them were mine, of course, but within the group. It was actually a lot of fun, a fair bit less awkward than I would have anticipated, but that seems to be the theme for this trip. Overall, it was just great to be able to catch up with people who played significant roles in my college life, even though I wasn't necessarily close friends with them all.

The rest
That's all I'd written before today. I had less time the last couple of days of the trip. I got to hang out with a couple of high school friends, Havliand and Vladimir, and I even bumped into a Paideian that I didn't know was in NY. I took a ton of pictures, but I've yet to make the photo section of this site, so you'll just have to imagine them.

The return flight was just as easy as the first. I was actually surprised that JFK security didn't take longer. It was really easy. I noticed something on the plane, though. Before the in-flight movie (something crappy I'd never heard of) they showed previews of CBS' upcoming fall season. Isn't it enough that we're paying for the ticket and the headset? Should we really have to sit through half an hour of commercials poorly disguised as hollywood inside info? I guess that while we can stop listening or look elsewhere, it's not like we can get up and leave, making us the ideal audience.

So now I'm glad to be back home, glad to see the cats and excited to not be living out of a duffel bag, but it was still sad to go. I don't know when I'm going to get to see these people again. As much as modern air-travel is a speedy and convenient thing, it's still not easy to take a weekend trip across the country. Someone should get to work on teleportation.