Spice Up Your Life

Happy belated Valentine’s Day, all. Or Singles Awareness Day, unofficially, depending on how empty or full your love glass is this February.

Hope everyone got to spend their day watching deliveryman after messenger deliver blooming bouquets and sweets to your building of primarily females, as I did. And then to walk home alongside every Joe hurrying home with said flowers and candy, obviously coming up with some ploy as to come across as “not forgetting” the occasion.

My parents actually sent me a Valentine’s Day care package and cookies from a bakery in our hometown. Delicious, if not nutritious.

The roommates and I celebrated by trying out a hot dog place on the UWS called Gray’s Papaya. They serve hot dogs and different types of juice and sodas. That’s it. They had a sign for a “Recession Special” which was two hotdogs and a beverage for $3.50. I can say with certain confidence that it’s the cheapest meal we’ve eaten here. I can definitely envision stopping there on our way to Riverside Park for a lazy Saturday afternoon in the spring.

We also stopped by a place in our neighborhood to get manicures and pedicures for the very appealing price of $19.95. Few things are less expensive in New York than in Texas, but frankfurters and French nails are two of them.

I got on the subway the other night, and at the stop after mine an entire gaggle of British students and their chaperones got on the same car as me. They were all dressed in their Euro-hipster garb, chatting away about teenage shenanigans, and that’s when it hit me.

The Spice Girls were in town.

And by “town” I mean they came to New Jersey. My friend MT at work got to go see them and reported back that they were just as awesome as my middle-school self remembered them to be. You start feeling old when bands (okay Posh & Co. aren’t so much a band as a “group”) you once enjoyed start having kids and doing reunion tours.

I talked to my Mom last night and she didn’t realize I had a three-day weekend for President’s Day. She suggested plugging some numbers into flight websites and trying to find a random, inexpensive flight to get me home for the weekend, which seemed like a good idea when I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 8:30 this morning.

The plan lost its’ luster when 5:00 rolled around and all the flights I was pulling up were minimum $800 and would require me to have layovers all day Monday and possibly sleep in the Atlanta airport. I gave up and went to the gym.

AV’s Mom (JV) and younger brother (DV) arrived this evening in the city for a weekend visit. DV has never been here, and as JV treated us to dinner tonight and DV laid out his plan for his first trip to the Big Apple, we watched AV’s eyes got bigger with every mention of the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium.

‘Empire State Building’ translates to “Herald Square Hell”, and “Yankee Stadium” means, “who even knows how long it will take to get up to the Bronx on a Saturday on the A train”.

I’m sure she will do it all, because she’s great like that. In the meantime, KR and I have big plans for an all-weekend sleepover and probably a lot of sleeping in and hopefully a movie, if there’s time. We have a lot of sleeping to do.

Goodnight, cyberspace.

"Love wins. Love always wins."
-Morrie; "Tuesdays With Morrie"