"Why Can't You Just Stay In Tonight?"

• Because there's a really rad band playing.
• Because my friends will be there.
• Because my friends are playing in a really rad band.
• Because of a boy.
• Because I promised.
• Because I love me some tapas.
• Because after seven years of going home on time to cook dinner and watch Jeopardy, I realized I much prefer this.
• Because it's on the way.
• Because I've run out of Lost episodes to watch.
• Because the Obama administration waited until freakin' 6 pm to dump the damn FOIA documents and there's no way I'm going to Gristede's so I might as well go to Allen Street.
• Because Koz scored tickets.
• Because I'm not really keen to go home to that empty apartment tonight.
• Because missing the moment is unacceptable.
• Because it's pub quiz night.
• Because it's going to be EPIC, DUDE. EP. ICK.
• Because the Eagles aren't on TV today.
• Because I had a crap day at work.
• Because I live in New York City. Der.
• Because I need a drink and a hug.
• Because Jennie made cupcakes.
• Because it's beautiful out.
• Because the laundry can freakin' wait.
• Because I'm gonna be glad I did this when I'm old and boring.
  
• Because I already scooped the litterbox and showered this morning, so I'm good.
• Because this is where I want to be.
• Because if you had a second chance at the road not taken, you'd do it too.

NYC Love Letters: Central Park

When I lived in DC, my visits to NYC weren't as frequent as I would have liked them to be. So when I would visit, there were certain items on the itinerary that absolutely had to happen. One of those was to take at least 20 minutes to sit in Central Park, no matter the weather, and watch people go by. Usually I'd go at sunset, over by the Upper West Side's 72nd Street entrance, when all of the families would be out, and people would be going for their evening run, or walking their dog. And I'd always wonder if these people knew how amazing it was to have this place as part of their routine, and if they knew how fortunate they were to be able to walk a few blocks from their apartments and think of Central Park -- Central Park! -- as their own backyard. Did they know how goddamn lucky they were?

Guess what? They do.

Dear DC

Dear DC:

Oh, this is precious.

You think that, just because I've been gone eight months, you can still get a rise out of me by trading for my (admittedly polarizing) quarterback? You think I'd take something like that personally, don't you?

DC, you are correct.

Now, DC, I know this has as much to do with the usual breathtaking forward-thinking of the Eagles' front office as anything else, but I am not talking to them right now.

I am talking to you.

So, since you insist on being yourself, let me make a few things clear.

DC, I prefer my cramped walkup apartment with no A/C to my old 1200-square-foot, rooftop pool and gym, 24-hour front desk Mass Ave shangri-la any day. That is how glad I am to not be with you.

DC, New York is more interesting, better-looking and more virile than you will ever be.

DC, they have Five Guys here. So I REALLY don't need you anymore.

DC...okay, DC, you still have Ben's and the 9:30 Club. You've got me there. And IOTA. But that's technically in Virginia, so not germane to our discussion. God, they have good fries at IOTA...

DC, Jeff Laurie may make me want to kick puppies sometimes, but Dan Snyder? Right. Discussion over before it starts, DC, and you know it.

DC, nine times out of ten...NO...nineteen times out of twenty...I was faking it.

DC, I will take the vomit and blood-spattered streets of First Avenue over any of your damn cherry blossoms any day.

DC, you may take my money, you may take my quarterback, but you will never take my freedom.

And I sweartagod, DC, if you win a Super Bowl this year, I will get on a Bolt bus, and I will come down there, and I will cut you.

And, DC, if we win a Super Bowl this year, I am deleting this blog post.

I hate you, DC. God, I hate you.

XO
R

PS Oh, and DC? If you're wondering why I live in New York and not Philadelphia, I will thank you not to change the freakin' subject. Jerk.

Chez Shep: The Two Minute Tour

Like MTV Cribs. For poor people.

We Don't Do Snow Days

If there's 10 inches of snow on the ground, and 10 more expected, and you're in New York City, you're going to work.

Boys' weekend; Get classy with scallops and lavender!

This weekend I had a pantload of fun with my boys in NYC. I chilled in the park and wandered through bookstores with my high school pal Alex, I had burgers and beer with honorary Team 215 member Koz, saw a kickass Travis gig with my rockstar friend Shwa, had pancakes on the Lower East Side with my new friend Andy, and then returned home just in time for my friend Chris' gig in DC. It was the best series of non-date dates I've had in a while. Thanks, boys! I think.

However, there was a certain amount of grubbiness involved in the weekend, as it was a bit hot, and I had but one outfit and little recourse for a shower. There may have been a bit of a mishap with a too-quickly-chugged Miller Lite as well. May have been. Only Shwa, and my confessors, and most of 11th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues know for sure...

ANYWAY, much as I enjoyed my dirty weekend with the lads, I felt I needed to take back what remained of my dignity and dainty-ladyness. I'm not sure how well I succeeded, but making this dish sure made me feel a bit more classy.

Seared scallops with basil and lavender essence

Ingredients
15 to 20 basil leaves
1 clove garlic
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 drops pure lavender essence (usually available in health food stores in the herbal remedies aisle. DO NOT substitute synthetic).
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 pound large sea scallops

Method
Combine the basil, garlic, salt and pepper in a food processor until smooth. Add the lavender oil and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. Let stand for 30 minutes. Cut a deep horizontal slit through the scallops, but not the whole way through. Fill with the basil mixture, close with a wooden pick. Drizzle with the remaining olive oil. Heat 2 tablespoons butter in a skillet, and heat until foamy. Add scallops and sear for 2 minutes on each side. Scallops should be browned, and translucent on the inside. Remove from pan immediately.

If you can't find lavender oil, just sprinkle with lemon juice. Scallops can also be grilled rather than seared.

There! Don't we feel civilized? Now I'm gonna crack open a Sam Adams and watch the Phils. In my underwear. Class. Easy come, easy go.

Home Again

Or I should say home for the first time. It's been a year and a half since I last moved all my gear up to New York. Several residences later, I finally trucked it all back home. Dadoo did a marvelous job cramming the Buick full of stuff. Moving day really makes me feel very sad and materialistic. Unpacking day makes me even more sad. But I think about how nice it is to have stuff, and I don't feel so bad.

I am sad about leaving New York, although it's good to be home, and I'm excited for London (such a cornucopia of emotions!).

Okay, back to unloading boxes. How such a little person accumulates so much stuff is a mystery to me. Ah well.

Robyn

E.B. White

"The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges...The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, the black headlines of the latest edition...In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm."

-- E.B. White, Here Is New York, 1949

Philistines 'R Us

I finally went to the Museum of Modern Art today. Maybe I'm ignorant, though I like to think I'm a fairly well-educated person. I just didn't get it.

I think I may be spoiled by the Met. The Met is fairly cheap ($5 for students), extremely large, and consequently, guaranteed to have something for everyone. It is also the museum that I visit the most.

The MOMA, by contrast, is $8.50 for students (that's a lot of Ramen Noodles, friends), three floors high (one of which is entirely dedicated to a single exhibit), and can be torn through in well under an hour. The most famous painting in the collection, Van Gogh's The Starry Night is on loan. Plus, I'm afraid modern art just doesn't thrill me.

I'm sure I'm missing something. Modern art comprises so very many movements and genres that it seems unfair to toss off the lot of it. But golly gee, if I'm already paying so much to get in, I'm not about to shell out another $4 for the headset that will explain it all to me. I'm all for letting the viewer draw their own conclusions, but if you're gonna present me with a plain white canvas as a finished work, may I please have a dinky little write-up of some kind by the artist's name telling me why? Just a clue? No? Okay. I'm obviously a flaming philistine.

If anyone feels like they could take me to the MOMA and help me try to see what I'm missing, I'm completely game. Let's just please go on Pay-What-You-Wish Night.

Ignorantly Yours,

Robyn

A Tasty Place to Live

Blarf

Blarf is how I feel after what I have consumed in the past 30 hours.

Now, I'm not one of those chickies that obsesses over what I eat, but consider this rather unladylike list:

A whole bag of popcorn (mind you, it was light)

A bacon burger

A taquito sandwich (sausage and scrambled egg on bread)

Popcorn chicken and obligatory biscuit

Cheesecake (from East Village pastry mecca, Venierio's)

Nog, sweet nog

Blarf

It doesn't help that New York is such a tasty place in which to live. On our walk this evening around a healthy portion of the Village, Jeffrey and I passed so very many interesting restaurants. Thai, vegetarian Indian, Ukrainian, Belgian fries, diners a-plenty, etc.

One of our favorite places is Bamiyan, an Afghani place up on 26th Street. We were patronizing Bamiyan before helping out your local Afghani neighbors in times of crisis was the cool thing to do. They don't seem to be suffering there, although they have covered all mention of "Afghan" outside their restaurant with American flags.

They have a drink there called doogh, which I find delightful, but others find repulsive. It's yogurt and mint leaves and seltzer water. It sorta tastes like carbonated sour cream. You'd think that would be a bad thing, but it's not. It goes great with a kebab.

I must away to the lavatory, for to swig some Pepto now. Farewell.

Robyn

Ground Zero

So I finally went to Ground Zero this weekend. I had thought that I had let a sufficient amount of time pass since September 11 to mitigate the awfulness of that visit. It didn't work as well as I hoped.

I was surprised how close we could get to the wreckage. At some points we were only about two blocks away. I was also surprised at how it just, well, sneaks up on you. We got out of the Wall Street 4/5 subway stop near Trinity Church, and could see crowds of people along Broadway gathered at each intersection. So it wasn't so much a surprise in that you knew you were about to see something when you got close to the crowds.

I think I was at Liberty Street when I first saw the wreckage up close. I believe it was what was left of 4 WTC, but it could have been the South Tower. What I do know was that it was a brown, twisted, burned out, massive piece of destruction. It was the visual manifestation of Violence, if that makes any sense at all. You look at it, and that's the only word that comes to mind, repeating itself over and over. Violence, Violence, Violence. It's breathtaking. Jeffrey said I had a visible physical reaction, that I recoiled upon first seeing it. It was one of the few times during this whole thing that I wanted to cry. I guess my Shepherdian revulsion of crying in public won out, because I didn't.

We also saw 5 WTC, where my roommate Christine worked until September 10. It's still standing, but it's not worth much as a building now. It too is burned out and devoid of most of its exterior. They'll have to tear it down. The sign from the Borders bookstore is still in the blown-out window.

We got ourselves good and lost while down there, as any sense of geography that Jeffrey and I had of the area isn't worth much of anything now. So we spent two hours or so there. If you're planning a trip there, I wouldn't recommend staying that long. You don't need to. Walk down Broadway, maybe down Rector. Maybe take a picture or two (yes, it feels morbid and tasteless to snap photos, but I figured that 20 years down the line, I'll have something poignant and real to show the progeny). Then go home.

It occurs to me that anyone reading these Updates would think I'm completely obsessed with death and destruction. I do think about other things. Today I spent a lovely sick day reading for class, watching Jeopardy! and perusing silly rock-band websites.

Of course, the book I was reading was Hiroshima, but I suppose that can't be helped.

Robyn

If the economy of New York City is flagging, it sure as hay ain't my fault.

Today was a bona fide tourist day. It's good to have such a day once in a while, because it reminds me what a neato place I live in. But it's tough on the wallet.

First, it was off to the Met for my Painting and Sculpture in New York class. Today was 19th Century European Paintings Day, which in art-nerd-speak translates to Super Fun Happy Good Day. After viewing many a Degas and Monet, I was delighted to discover that my professor and I share the same favorite painting -- Jules Bastien-LePage's Joan of Arc. We both agreed that it was one of the most overlooked, underrated, and downright purtiest things in that wonderful building, and then we giggled, because that's what art nerds do.

Jeffrey's mom is in town, and they explored the American wing while my professor and I were giggling over French impressionists. Then we dined on overpriced Indian food that did ridiculous things to my stomach.

I went to the top of the Empire State Building tonight, which is something that I haven't done since junior high. I had tried a couple of times over the summer, but wasn't too keen on waiting in line for an hour.

But tonight, after going through the newly-installed metal detectors, we saw that there was NOBODY there. Deserted. We went right up to the window, right to the elevator, and right up to the observation deck, where we finally found other people, although not much. Prior to September 11, a nice Friday night like this would have found the place thronged with people.

And the southern view...

I read a lot of magazines after The Thing That Was Bad, and I remember one quote by a little boy who said that it looked like New York had lost it's two front teeth. I haven't had many opportunities since then to see the skyline from afar. Sure enough, there's a gaping hole in the southern skyline. In the dark, the space is filled with an ethereal glow from the lights at Ground Zero. It's a sad, sad sight.

But the rest of the city looks fabulous. I was very happy to see that the northern view is dominated by my favorite building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza (or the Big Pretty Building). Big, white pretty building with millions of orange lights as a backdrop, blue bridges, light vestiges of clouds beneath you. It's a lovely place. I'll miss it a lot come spring.

Time to write a paper and play with my new, pretty, overpriced snowglobe.

It's fun to be a tourist sometimes.

Robyn

Caution: Quasi-Self-Righteous Tirade

New York smelled like burning building again today. It hasn't done so in awhile, but I think that the warmer weather today had something to do with it. It's not a good smell. It's an odd smell. It's definitely a burning smell of some kind, but acrid. Sort of like burning rubber, but not quite. I doubt it's going away any time soon. It will probably smell like that when I get back from London in May.

Too many sad days in New York. Too many hysterical newscasts. The poor news stations seem so disappointed at the prospect that Flight 587 wasn't blown up by terrorists.

It's a very interesting -- and at times, disheartening -- time to be a journalism student. On Monday we had a guest speaker from Newsweek come into one of my classes. He expressed his disappointment with his publication for propagating a vapid sense of jingoism. And I'm inclined to agree with him.

Don't get me wrong. I love my country. I love this city. Osama Bin Laden is a bad, bad person. And I'm happy that the Taliban seems to be out of business.

I'm just not entirely convinced that the ends justify the means. Should we have been over there for the reasons we were? Should we have gone in a long time ago to help the people in Afghanistan? Will abolishing the Taliban help us find out who crashed those planes? Is the Northern Alliance much better than the Taliban? They've been known to execute dissenters as well. It's just that we're more inclined to agree with the Northern Alliance's political views, so Peter Jennings glosses over the fact that they killed 100 Taliban sympathizers yesterday (not necessarily soldiers mind you, just sympathizers).

It's all very confusing.

I'll get off my soapbox now. Anyone else want a go?

Robyn

"The Thing That Was Bad"

Everything's back on track again. The lovely phone people hooked the phone back up, and my computer decided to function normally again, so I can re-join the 21st century.

Otherwise, situation normal -- or as normal as one can ask for given the shenanigans and goings-on. Roommate Christine and I are tired of the euphemisms for September 11 ("the events," "the tragedy," "the bombing," when it wasn't really a bombing to begin with). We prefer to call it The Thing That Was Bad, and leave it at that.

Of course, we're both not sure that we've fully dealt with it yet. Our semi-flippant attitude may be an indication of some greater distress, which will probably rear its ugly head a few months from now in the form of a meltdown in the produce section of a British supermarket, causing much embarrassment to ourselves and many peas to be thrown about. Maybe all we need is to distance ourselves from it.

I have not yet been to Ground Zero (two miles south), and I'm not entirely sure whether it will help or hurt. It's not like I need to go see "proof" to assure myself of the reality of the situation. I saw (and smelled, and inhaled, and choked on) enough for that. But I do need to cross 3rd Street sometime before I leave. Bobby's coming up Thanksgiving weekend, so we'll try then.

On the upside of things, it looks like the country's returning to "normalcy" (a wonderful buzzword, might I add). Rather than jeopardize their "Survivor" and "Friends" ratings, CBS and NBC did not air Bush's comments to the CDC. Bless them for reminding us of what's really important. Or something.

Robyn