The first time I saw Kamran’s apartment building, I’ll admit I was wooed. It looked like a castle on the outside and was filled with fresh flowers and gleaming chandeliers on the inside. One my friends recently said it seems like Harry Potter would live there.
After more than three years of visiting it, though, I’ve gotten used to it and its doormen, porters, and nice-men-who-pick-up-the-recycling-from-the-trash-room. Which is why I thought it was a pretty big deal when Kamran got an e-mail from the building saying they were going on strike if their union didn’t reach an agreement with the local apartment building owners.
But they did, and they didn’t go on strike, and I was a little offended by the piece in the New York Times about it:
A strike would have disrupted the daily routines of hundreds of thousands of middle-class residents from upper Broadway to Brownsville, as well as affluent owners of Park Avenue penthouses. Along with picket lines in front of many of their homes, they would be confronted with the loss of the people who sign for their packages, carry their luggage and let the pizza deliverers and dog walkers into the building.
I’m totally not wrong in thinking that’s written facetiously, right? MY DINNER AND PACKAGES ARE IMPORTANT!! Not the dogs, though.
As I was walking past the courthouse after work yesterday, the big pink hippo party truck outside caught my attention. I noticed the red lights and letters across the front and tried to figure out what kind of event was going on, but I just couldn’t comprehend what was being spelled out.
Bigger
Eventually, I realized it was supposed to say Vanity Fair, but um, it doesn’t. Hmm?
Guess who isn’t filling out the census. Everyone in my neighborhood!
And Colbert did a segment about it:
Isn’t irony adorable?
NYC winters are so depressing, as I may have melodramatically mentioned before, that I think you can physically feel the weight lifting when it gets above 50 degrees. To celebrate being able to wear hoodies instead of parkas, I’ve been taking off down unfamiliar streets after work every day and walking until I miss my TV too much and have to hop on the subway to get home as fast as possible.
It’s so nice to see places I wouldn’t otherwise have reason to and to not care how slow the tourists in front of me are walking when I get up to City Hall or Chinatown. And when I stopped to take this photo, a man in a suit coming out of one of the judicial buildings passed by and said, “Isn’t that magnificent?! I took a picture of it just yesterday.” BFFs!
The one tree in New York City.
The only problem is that I keep seeing all of these happy couples out walking through the parks and holding hands, and I have to remind myself that Kamran will be graduating from law school in a year and will be so powerful and important that he’ll be able to leave work every day at 3 p.m. to come pick me up for all of the wandering and Staten Island Ferry rides I can handle.
Of course, they don’t know this, so I have to take out my cellphone and say things like “no, I love you more” to the nonexistent person on the other end to prove my happiness.
If I could sum New York City up in one photo, this would be it:
It’s the most nondescript café: “a scoop of cottage cheese” on the menu, a few food inspection violations every year, a single review on urbanspoon.com. And yet, you’ll notice that their sign says:
I’ll bet.
