Last night, Boyfriend Kamran and I had a leisurely yakitori dinner complete with watermelon sorbet in his neighborhood to celebrate a law school A that he didn’t expect but wholly deserved. As we walked back up the hill to his apartment, I looked expectantly at my feet like I do every time I wear flip-flops in NYC, waiting for a cockroach to crawl over my bare toes. I told Kam that I saw a cockroach in our gym that morning, and he wondered aloud when cockroach season is. I said it seems to be at the start of summer and the start of winter and concluded that cockroaches must be adverse to extreme weather changes, but he sarcastically derided me and said that surely they’ve evolved enough to handle a little temperature fluxuation what with their ability to withstand nuclear attacks and all. We started talking about how ridiculous it is that instead of adapting, humans just do things like move to Florida when the going gets too rough, and I argued that things would be so much better if we were pigs; our pores wouldn’t leak, so we’d just have to recognise when we were overheating and find a way to cool ourselves down. We talked about redesigning the human body to have an internal coolant system with a refrigeration pump and selling our upgraded version of man at a steep price.
While we were having this discussion, we passed one of the hand-carved Italian stone buildings next to his, where four women were leaning against a low wall and chatting. They were all in their 30s and wore their long, highlighted hair down despite the heat. They had on atrocious heels and clingy dresses, and they sipped from martini glasses in between laughs. They were the exact opposite of us. When our conversation finished, I asked Kamran, “Did you see that?”, and he said, “What, those women trying to reenact ‘Sex and the City’?” And we laughed and laughed about how superior we are.
The thing is–I’m pretty sure this sort of business is going on every night in Manhattan. Kamran and I know that we’re weird, but isn’t everyone else weirded out by how normal they are?
