I'm back from New York City again. This time though, my 5-day stint was almost completely different from last time (August '05) in the sense that it revolved almost entirely around alcohol. I mean, sure, sightseeing is great and all, but nothing beats a good weekend of sightblackingout right? Because I'm pretty sure that's what happened three nights in a row. (Nope, wait, checking my dialed calls list….annnnd…yep, I've successfully narrowed down the times range through drunk dials.) I like to think of it as CSI: The Away Game.

Sightblackingout is cool because then other people get to tell you what sights you saw/made out with/got in a fight with/called the “statue of puberty” to their face. Then sometimes you get to re-live those memories in a hazy fog the next day when you see those same people in a different setting. Not saying “statue of puberty” is always wrong, just that sometimes the tactic of using the “so, you wanna makeout?” line twice in a row doesn't always guarantee success. Especially when she has a boyfriend and already cheated on him with a friend of yours the night before.

Speaking of alcohol, why is it that alcohol is the hardest drug to take? I mean like, it's physically challenging to drink a lot of beer and liquor, whereas say, heroin, cocaine…even prescription drugs are so simple. I think you should have to work harder for more potent drugs, not the other way around. I mean, why don't they have alcohol in some kind of concentrated, time-release pill yet? Wow, that's got to be the safest alternative I've ever come up with.

Also, if alcohol were in a pill, where would we go on weekends (/weeknights)? You wouldn't need to “go get drunk” anymore. Maybe bars would cease to exist and everything would just be a house party. That's what people do when they “go get high” right? Then I asked myself if alcohol WAS in a pill, would I really miss beer and liquor? Am I in it for the taste at all, or is it totally a marketing mind-fuck? I couldn't really answer that question either.

The Canon factory is still being a bitch and holding my digital camera hostage in their repair factory, so I have exactly zero photos from the trip. Good thing my friend Krishna had the good sense to carry two extra batteries and one extra memory card everywhere we went so my sum total of pictures now comes to somewhere around 1250. I hope some sweatshop worker is loading up my memory card with pictures of illegal working conditions and pleas for help so I can sell them to 60 Minutes for some undercover feature story or something.

I have a renewed faith in haste after deboarding my flight today. As I got off, I kind of needed to hurry to catch the last MARTA train home. So I walked fast out of the terminal, carefully plotting each step around people in the most efficient fashion, ducking up and down escalators and in and out of terminal shuttles. The whole time I thought what an idiot people who try to rush around look like when they finally get somewhere and the rush was almost always unnecessary (traffic light is red, baggage isn't there yet, the other lane ends up being slower than the one you were in, flight is delayed, etc.). But I continue rushing anyway, playing the fool…right up 'til I got to the oval baggage carousel and my bag literally dropped down in stride as I continued to the MARTA train. I looked up to see the stars align but I was still inside. I can only assume there was some sort of rare solar eclipse.

(Btw, sorry about no columns Sunday, they'll be up with tonight's. I def need a new laptop with functioning wireless…)

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