So I spent the weekend in New York, and even though I’d never been there before, I figured it out pretty well for a first timer. Here are some of the things I learned after five days in “The City.”

There’s a common myth that New Yorkers are mean people. This is definitely untrue. New Yorkers aren’t mean, they’re just tired of having shit shoved into their faces. Everywhere you go in New York City, someone is standing there, in the middle of the sidewalk shoving a pamphlet at you about some heinous crime overseas that we should be protesting or some flyer for their shitty comedy show. In order to not be mistaken for a tourist, New Yorkers have developed evil glaring facial expressions, which they use while barreling forward as fast as possible, so just in case any of these hander-outers don’t realize what the scowl means, it won’t matter because they’ll already be gone, disappeared into the crowd. It took me a couple of days to pick up on it, but now I too have mastered the art of looking pissed at the world, and can defend myself, not only from people on the streets of New York, but also those pushy perfume ladies in the mall.

Another stereotype of New Yorkers is that they’re always in a hurry to get some where. This is true, and here’s why: In a city where a car is not only unnecessary, but a pain in the ass to have, people in New York have three basic ways of getting around: Cabs – while hailing a cab is fun and empowering, emptying out your wallet to pay the sketchy ass driver is anything but. Another option is the subway. The subway is definitely cool, and less scary than people would have you believe. The problem with the subway is that even though it goes all over the city, there is a limit to how close you can actually get to where you want to go, which gets us to the third option: walking. It’s fairly easy to walk from one part of Manhattan to another, seeing as even though it seems huge, it’s actually a fairly small island that just happens to be cursed with an insane number of people on it. The problems with walking, however, are fairly obvious: You’re always running late. Ten city blocks doesn’t sound like very far, and it’s not hard to time things so that you get wherever you’re going on time. The problem is that you have to take into account all the things that will slow you down: people shoving shit in your face, parades, massive crowds of people, etc. Another problem is shoes. Most people who work in Manhattan have figured out the art of bringing spare shoes with them to walk in and a different pair to wear at work, however, as a tourist it took me two miserable days to figure out. It’s ass hard to look cute in the bar when you’re hobbling from one place to another. Additionally, women’s dress shoes can get caught in one of the many grates gracing the sidewalks of the city. While they might blow hot air and feel good to walk over on cold days, it’s no fun to keep going forward only to find that your shoe has decided to stay behind. As I found out, with the added insult of breaking my shoe, and having to limp around all day on shoes that not only hurt, but also wouldn’t stay on my feet because the leather on the front was ripped apart. Another problem with walking is the fact that New York can get COLD. You’d walk fast too if you were running late while wearing uncomfortable dress shoes, and attempting to avoid people handing out flyers while stepping around grates for ten city blocks with a blistering wind blowing away any warmth your $200 Burberry (read: plaid) scarf might have brought. This is the life of a New Yorker.

Another thing I learned about New York is the fact that everything is expensive. People are always bitching about how much their tiny, old apartments cost, but I figure, you know, it’s like why people pay extra money to go to an Ivy League school: they’re paying for the name of the institution, more so than the actual education. People in NYC are paying for the location. What I’d be bitching about is the insane cost of everything else. In Times Square, a cheeseburger at TGI Friday’s is $15. At a regular Friday’s it’s like half of that. We’d go out to bars, and a Coors Light would be $9. You could always tell the people who were tourists in said bars, because they’d be the ones swirling around the foam at the bottom of the glass, or turning bottles upside down and shaking them in search of the gold chips or Knicks season tickets that must have been included in the beer. I guess we too, were paying for location. After all, a beer in The Village is different from a beer anywhere else if only because you look for the prize in the bottom like it’s a box of cereal and not an overpriced bottle of domestic lager.

Probably the worst thing about New York is the lack of bathrooms. Restaurants won’t let you use them unless you’re eating there and stores claim not to have them. I spent two thirds of my time in New York standing in lines for the toilet at McDonald’s while someone else ate cheeseburgers so the register people would buzz me in. That’s right, we had to be buzzed into a bathroom. In McDonald’s.

After a lot of thought on the subject, I decided that anyone who lives in NYC has to be given props if only for the fact that they put up with all the stupid tourists standing in the middle of the sidewalk gaping at the lights and commercials playing in Times Square, or blocking up the entrance to the subway because they’re trying to read maps and decide whether to take the local or the express. I don’t know if I could live somewhere where every ten to fifteen minutes a double-decker bus goes by, full of Wisconsinites gaping at you in your tiny ass studio apartment while the tour guide tells them the outrageous price you pay to live there and they make obnoxious comments like “Back home you could buy twenty acres and some cows for that.” Yes, indeed, I have an appreciation for people who can live through that, and though I wonder at my ability to stand it, if by some miracle someone decides to give my ass a job there, you can bet I’ll be singing “New York, New York” at the top of my lungs in a few months as I pack up my U-Haul.

And taking an idea from Aaron Karo’s column on collegehumor.com, here are some random thoughts/things I want to bitch about…

I hate that there’s no good way to end a conversation with someone you don’t know well. It’s like you have to have known someone for a few years before you can leave them without that long awkward period where you say goodbye, then they say something else, and say goodbye, and then you respond to whatever they said and say goodbye again, and on and on. What is the etiquette, exactly, for deciding when the conversation is over?

“So it was really nice meeting you.”
“It was great meeting you too. If you’re ever in New York again look me up.”
“Oh, I totally will.”
Awkward silence.
“Okay, bye,”
Crap I forgot to extend the same offer. “Yeah, if you’re ever in Wisconsin give me call.”
“Sure thing,” crap, I already said goodbye, say something else that means the same thing. “Have a safe trip home.”
“Thanks, you too. And thanks again for letting me stay/giving me a job/buying me a coffee.”
“No prob.”
Do you see where this is going? There are a million last minute goodbye things you can say to someone, and many of them are so vague that it’s hard to be sure whether it’s an actual goodbye or whether it’s one of those things that you say to lead up to the goodbye. This always gets me, and unfortunately usually just as I’m getting the absolute clear “goodbye,” I’ll think of something else I was supposed to say/need to tell them. It makes me wish face to face conversations were like IM and you could lie and say that you have a phone call or someone at the door and leave abruptly.

Why is picking a movie always so hard? I’m friends with these people, right? We have a pretty good amount in common, right? So why is it that after an hour in Blockbuster, we still can’t even agree on a genre?

I was thinking that it must suck to be a statistician. When I think of statisticians, I think of some poor soul sitting up in a booth at a football game leafing through volumes of facts just so the announcer can tell us some titillating bit of trivia like “This is the first team in the last eleven years to score three touchdowns within five minutes of each other, all caught by the same receiver, but thrown by different quarterbacks.” Who needs to know that? The point of trivia is to be able to whip it out at a party or something, and that’s hard to do when you can’t remember all the little parts of it. I bet that’s how a lot of misinformation gets started. At some awkward cocktail party someone turns to his neighbor and says: “So, I heard the Ravens are the first team in eleven years to score three touchdowns with different quarterbacks.” And even if the fact is correct, because it’s not particularly interesting, (the ones they bring up in the middle of a game never are) what are you supposed to say? “Oh really. That’s so…interesting.” All the while you’re really thinking, who the hell cares? Time to go to the bathroom and get away from this socially inept loser.

Another job that it would suck to have would be back-up singer in rap and R&B songs. Years of vocal training and hard work all so that you can be in the background of a song singing things like “Give it to me daddy,” over and over again. You can’t really show off your work or anything either, really. “Wait, wait, you hear that guy in the background yelling ‘Pussy licked!’? That’s me, mom!”