Departure Diary, part 1: 1,680 New York Minutes

So, here I am.

Yes, to make a long story short, I'm really here in Switzerland. Yes, the view is lovely, yes, the campus is cool, yes, I've met lots of new people. That will have to wait, while I tell the aforementioned long story against better judgment.

My journey began with a 4-hour car ride from my home in Maryland to a hotel in Manhattan. My flight left from JFK International Airport the next day, and my family and I drove up and stayed overnight. The drive there was uneventful, i.e., I was passed out in the car. Waking up at, gasp, 9:00 AM really took it out of me, and fortunately my parents were pulling chauffeur duty. When I woke up we were parked outside the Guggenheim art museum, which, as you might imagine, was rather disorienting. “We’re where? Why? How? What time and date is it?”

The Guggenheim was cool, although at the time it was showcasing a certain artist and the whole experience was rather single-minded. The artist, Robert Prince (that’s right, the artist known as Prince), was famous for writing dirty jokes on giant, monochromatic canvasses, and, I suppose, for getting them put in art galleries. It was interesting the first time, but after the sixth twenty-foot-tall “There once was a man from Nantucket” it began to wear. Personally I derived more enjoyment from the annotations, which would always say things like “Early in Prince’s career he was influenced by new-wave photographers such as blah blah blah,” and imagining an art gallery full of the works of the, er, other Artist with the same moniker.

After the Guggenheim we took the subway to the Carnegie Deli, where we got truly monstrous quantities of meat. Seriously, I estimate they took a good 35% of a cow and put it between two slices of whole grain, and served it to my 15-year-old brother. I personally got a hamburger that looked like it was traced with a full-size Frisbee. We followed this up with a wad of strawberry cheesecake that would probably put a diabetic into a coma from fifteen paces, and then we all promptly died.

Dr. Hibbert: Looks like beef poisoning!

Diners: *GASP!*

Dr. Hibbert: ...Probably from some other restaurant.

Diners: Aaah. *go back to eating*

Hotels in New York are crammed in wherever they can possibly fit, and ours was wedged between a pizzeria and a, quote, “Hair Traders.” Although suspicious that I would wake up the next morning bald, we checked in and made our way to our bizarrely-shaped room. Because of the cramped area they had to warp and twist the room in such a way that I’m not sure it followed conventional laws of spatial geometry. Unfortunately, the inflatable mattress that I had taken to sleep on happened to be a regular rectangle and was at odds with the non-Euclidian R'yleh of a hotel room, and so it was kind of difficult to find space for it. Naturally I got stepped on repeatedly even with the best placement possible. Plus, like all inflatable mattresses, it deflated during the night, leaving me to wake up in the rather unenviable position of being denied sensation to the left half of my body. Hey, they did say it was “inflatable,” not, “will inflate and stay that way.”

Before I was due to leave at the airport we visited the Museum of Modern Art. Looking for parking, we spotted an empty section of curb across from the building and a meter. After paying, though, we noticed that there were some vaguely-worded signs indicating that the spot was for “commercial vehicles.” Looking at the other cars parked there (perfectly ordinary vans and sedans), we didn’t notice any indication that this was true, so we decided to chance it and park there anyway. We went in and had a lovely time for about an hour and a half.

Then, we were hitting up the gift shop which just happened to have a large glass window that looked out at the curb where we parked. I was browsing various artistic doodads when I heard my mom yelling, “Hey! They’re towing our car!” Her tone was not overly surprised, nor very urgent, simply an announcement of her intention and its cause. I freaked out and looked around for my dad but I couldn’t see him. I ran for the door and caught a glimpse of him, looking confused, as I left.

Across the street the tow truck was blinking its lights as my mom was scrambling to escape its clutches. As I got outside she was already backing up and pulling away from the curb. She crossed the street and pulled up alongside us, and we ran after the moving car, opened the door and jumped in like action heroes, and sped off before any more disasters could befall us.

I like to imagine the tow-truck driver describing that day’s adventure: “Aye, she was a beaut’, that big red ’03 Honda Odyssey. Catch o’ the day, big as yer livin’ room. But she slipped right off me hook. Arr.”

Then, to make a long and emotional three hours short, I arrived at JFK International, said goodbye to my family, checked my luggage, and got on a plane. The rest...to come!

Addendum: Ha ha ha, the Prince site I linked to had gotten a cease and desist notice from the courts.