Sunday, January 1, 2006
I returned to the apartment a few minutes ago from the Washington Square Diner, the place up on 4th street at 6th “Avenue of the Americas” avenue that I’ve been frequenting since I’ve moved into the neighborhood. I’m still foggy from the festivities last night and it seemed like some greasy diner food and a soda might help clear my brain a bit. But it didn’t really work. Or maybe it did.
At any rate, last night I watched the rather bland new Harry Potter movie before heading out. Frank Lantz, my game design professor, labelled Rowling’s Quidditch a “broken game” because winning relies so heavily on catching the buzzing bandersnatch (or whatever the hell that little thing it called) that it makes all other strategy useless. Which makes the game boring and un-fun. The games in the new movie were all equally broken and tedius and after about the sixth time a Hogwarts professor or someone gave Harry some sneaking piece of advice I found myself simply just not giving a shit anymore and wanting to leave. I agreed with Ron: If I attended school with Harry Potter I’d be pissed off at him, too.
Anyway.
After being blocked from entering the apartment building of a friend on 44th Street (a half-block from Times Square and, it turns out, crowded to the point that the landlord had called the police to come and keep additional revelers out), we headed down to Verlaine to the private party Sean had invited us to. Getting around Manhattan proved remarkably easy and even around 11pm we had no problem hailing a cab in midtown to get the the Lower East Side. The streets just off of Times Square were eerily quiet — a surprise considering the world-class media bedlam occuring right nearby.
I guess there’s not really much to say about what happened at Verlaine except that the night involved tasty complimentary shrimp and friend mushrooms… Otherwise I had the experience approximately a million New Yorker twenty-somethings had, went home late, woke up very late, and did next to nothing today (except watch some television and eat). And now it’s bedtime again. Awesome.
