It’s been two weeks since it happened, but it lives in my mind as if it was yesterday: the weekend Kamran decided he didn’t care about law school (his last semester!) and let me make a brunch reservation for us.

We dined in front of Lincoln Center at Bar Boulud, which was so completely boring as to render the name of this blog un-ironic, despite its cheese pastries that sparkle in the sun:

We made our way through Central Park to avoid 59th Street and the horse-drawn carriages that line it, but of course those itch-inducing allergybuckets follow us everywhere:

Walking down 5th Avenue, we passed by the all-glass Apple store and saw this man “coincidentally” standing outside:

And then stopped by FAO Schwarz, which oddly, neither of us had been to in our 5+ years here to:

1) take multiple pictures of ourselves with the LEGO Chewbacca while small children anxiously tried to crowd us out:

(that’s me and my cleavage between his legs!)

2) test our strength on a foam puzzle that’s the size of Kamran’s entire apartment:

3) and learn the true meaning of factory farming:

We talked about stopping by a Duane Reade to grab some candy to get our blood sugars primed for Halloween, but then we realized we were too close to Dylan’s Candy Bar to pass it up. What you have to understand about Dylan’s is that it’s a microcosm of New York City itself: it’s the most wonderful place on Earth and has everything you’d ever want in life, but you can’t even begin to afford it, and it’s full of all of the worst people imaginable. Dylan’s has every kind of candy ever made, but it costs $13.99 per pound. It has clear staircases filled with your favourite childhood treats, but they’re constantly crowded with dumb tourists. It’s wonderful. And awful.

So Kamran and I decided to get a single pound of candy to split, which we deemed a “reasonable” pre-Halloween snack. Then we got into the checkout line, which stretched literally to the door. As we stood there, a kind-of-friendly-but-kind-of-surly dad started talking to us out of nowhere about how he’s lived in NYC for 30 years and had never heard of Dylan’s up until then, and we just looked at him like, “Sucker.” Then he turned to his kid and said, “Should we try to make this last until Monday, or should we eat it all today?”, and I felt such love for humanity at that moment.

But then Kamran whispered, “There’s a lady over here on a Rascal who keeps eating the candy, and it’s really depressing me.” And indeed, this superfat middle-aged blobby thing came speeding over to our area a second later, gnawing on whatever she’d picked out of the bins with the “no sampling” signs on them and just smiling to beat the band. She couldn’t fit her scooter through the racks of candy blood we were standing near, so the guy and his son behind us offered to let her in front of them in line.

Outside, we passed a homeless person propped up against the side of a building, and not two feet in front of . . . it . . . I spotted an abandoned gummy bear that would’ve been soooooo perfect for Lost and Lonely Leftovers, so I stopped and took a step backward but then reconsidered and kept walking. Kamran asked what I was doing, and when I told him, he seemed to think this made me a bad person! But clearly this homeless person wasn’t hungry if it was letting a perfectly good gummy bear just sit there.

Moments later, the lady on the Rascal went speeding past us on the sidewalk, honking her horn and digging into her bag of candy as we went on to curse at old ladies.

Well, not “we”. Me.