all those flashing lights.

so, as some of you may or may not know, i just got back from the biggest place i’ve ever been in my entire life- new york city.

now, i know that you’re probably thinking ‘well DUH nikki, everybody on the planet knows that new york is big, you idiot.’ but let me tell you this- unless you’ve actually been dwarfed by the enormity of EVERYTHING there, you have no friggin’ idea, pal. new york made toronto feel like that tiny little town where your produce comes from.

we did the typical touristy stuff- times square, a small corner of central park, the statue of liberty from the other side of the river, the brooklyn bridge from a subway car on some other bridge, empire state building from outside, ground zero from outside the tall walls that now surround it. being a very successful tourist in new york city would require a lot of money, or the proportions of king kong. (i get why he climbed the empire state building now! he didn’t want to pay $50 to take the elevator!)

we arrived at roughly 9 30 am  after a shitty 11 hour bus ride over night. we took our stuff right to the hotel and then found the nearest convenience store to acquire cheap alcohol and energy pills. (GOD BLESS YOU, AMERICA!) we made our way to times square within a few minutes and found  a suitable watering hole called charly t’s shortly after 11 am.

 

the rest of the day was spent walking around and taking more pictures than an Asian bus tour. we visited the bb king bar for a really good dinner deal ($10 for a 10 oz burger and fries plus a pint. then all pints thereafter were only $2) and  did an awful lot of walking around. we eventually ended up back at the hotel where i tried to drunkenly fall alseep but got (quite literally) DRAGGED out of bed by scott who insisted i was coming swimming. the view from the penthouse of our hotel was absolutely beautiful, a vast expanse of twinkling lights and buildings as far as your eyes could see. the enormity of it was truly awe inspiring and made you kind of realize that this was all here before you, and it will go on just the same after you’re gone. new york city is the perfect place to go if you want to disappear and be anonymous.

saturday night scott, aron and i headed out to check out a place that had been recommended to us, it was called rudy’s and turned out to be close to our hotel. the place had all you can eat hot dogs and everything was covered in duct tape. ALL YOU CAN EAT HOT DOGS?! why aren’t people in canada this creative?!  turns out there must be a lot of poor, hungry people who had the same idea as we did and the place was rammed, so we chose not to stick around. however, i’d definately be into checking it out the next time i visit.  we just ended up at some generic little sports bar where i took over the juke box and got a bad case of dance in my pants. sadly, i was the only one feeling the vibes and we ended up back at the hotel after one drink. BOO!

when i woke up on saturday morning i remembered OMG WE’RE IN FUCKING NEW YORK CITY! and made everybody get out of bed. we headed out for breakfast and then went to check out the hells kitchen flea market. it turned out to be a pretty sweet place- completely vintage and something i would have been super into ordinarily, except i didn’t want to have to bring random dusty knick knacks back over the border in my already over stuffed bag. i did pick up a pair of furry boots to replace the only pair of shoes i’d brought with me… they were causing me more pain than the city had starbucks. (upon further inspection- i think they could potentially be real fur. ew. 😐 if so, they’re getting sold quickfast)

saturday afternoon was spent revisiting times square and making our first attempt at taking the very intimidating and large subway system. the subway system there is dirtier than ours is and instead of seeing mice you see rats, but it runs like a well oiled machine. all fares are kept on metro cards which you can reload and purchase in the stations. fare is only $2.25 and you can literally go ANYWHERE. their system is so gigantic it’s unbelievable. i think we went about 40 stops to get to the party on saturday night. however, the doors close without warning and scott saved my life when the doors closed ON me. nickie and aron are very good at figuring out what’s the tail and what’s the head, and we didn’t get lost once!

we went to a pub that we randomly stumbed into that had the most extensive beer list i have ever seen in my entire life, hands down. and from what we all concluded- none of the beer we tried was good, not even mine which was misleadingly dubbed ‘pretty things’. i don’t personally reckon the lingering taste of horse piss in the back of my throat to be particularly pretty, just sayin’.

we made the trek down to see the statue of liberty, but the ferry to get to it from the shore wasn’t cheap so instead we opted to admire it in all of it’s inch high glory from across the water for free. from there we went to check out ground zero which was close by. it’s really strange being there, and even almost 11 years later, the feeling of standing right there and thinking about the devestation that happened underneath your feet was very overwhelming. i remember watching the footage of the twin towers falling from the hallway of my high school, a world away. all i could think about was the people jumping out of the windows… it was really surreal and incredibly sad being there. you can still feel it.

from there we headed back up to central park, where we decided to only explore a corner of since it was dark and we know better than to hang out in parks at night. it’s very large and park like, and i’d very much like to go back there in the summer with my longboard. the area around there is very very pretty, the architecture throughout the whole city is a mix of modern sky scrapers and beautiful old buildings. it reminded me a lot of montreal. at the bottom tip of the park i recognized the circle road that i saw on the ellen show once. lol.

we headed back to the hotel where we napped and then got up and got dolled up for the party. the subway ride down to coney island was SO long- 40 something stops. however, we had some guy with an ipod and speakers to entertain us with his music along with amusing stop names like sheepshead and neck road. coney island looks SO friggin’ awesome… like an old amusement park from a movie, kind of shabby and very carnival-y. another definite must see in the warmer months.

before the party i went into a seedy convenience store on my quest for 4loco and FINALLY found it. it’s been banned in new york so most places didn’t have it, but i suspect this place was a back woods kind of convenience store and still stocked it cause it was kind of in the middle of nowhere. my review of 4loco- i shared it with scott, nickie and aron, but i still got drunk. i don’t understand why there is so much hype surrounding this one particular brand of strong, fruity malt liquor considering i’d been drinking other stuff that was also 14% alcohol called tilt and joose.. but whatever.

we got to the party just in time for angerfist to go on. the crowd wasn’t nearly as large as i expected, either. i was having a great time up near the front, taking pictures, jamming out. people were all super nice and surprisingly not as underage as i am used to at similar events here. when i looked back down at my little purse for my phone, i realized it was gone. i panicked. people around me started helping me look for it but the only thing that turned up was the front of the shell. i found aron and told him what happened and then the drunken water works started. i ran to the bathroom to be a girl and cry about it when nickie followed me. she saw how upset i was and bless her soul, she knows just the right words to say to cheer me up- ‘DON’T CRY! DON’T CRY! I PUNCHED A GUY IN THE HEAD BECAUSE HE SPILLED MY DRINK ON ME!’ which made me feel better. a very nice girl who was very high on e came over to make sure i was okay, then asked me if i wanted to see something awesome and then proceeded to show me her vibrating glove. oh ravers. i wiped my tears away and decided to follow arons advice and just try to have a good time after that. i bought myself 2 beers and i went back out to the dance floor and drunkenly flailed and got my moneys worth out of the trip- afterall, we were there to see angerfist. it was somewhere around that point that i started talking to the most attractive person that i’d seen on the entire trip (and no, thats not an exaggeration. i see more attractive people in PARKDALE than i did there. so don’t take all of our beautiful people for granted). i believe my opening line was ‘you’re the most attractive fellow i’ve seen on this entire trip.’ which was meant entirely as a genuine compliment.  we chatted for a few minutes and  i told him my terrible story about losing my phone. he asked me what kind of phone i had and i told him a palm pre. well, that is right about when a ray of light came down from heaven (or maybe it was just a lazer) because that most attractive fellow i’d seen in new york, who also happened to be very nice, pulled my phone out of his pocket and handed it back to me, telling me he’d found it in the mosh pit. $&^%^(&)&&$!@!!!!!  that would NEVER have happened at a party here, EVER. so the rest of my night was saved and all was well that ended well and we left right after angerfist ended.

the rest of saturday night is kind of hazy, save for a very vivid memory of vomiting on a subway platform and drunkenly throwing all my money at aron for a reason still unbeknown st to all of us to this day.

woke up sunday morning feeling less than stellar, obviously. i dragged my ass out of bed and packed my stuff and we headed out for breakfast and to catch the bus home. not much more can be said at this point except the bus reeked of farts and new york city is a LOOONG fucking way from home and while i do want to go back for my birthday in july, i will sell my body for air fare before enduring that stanky bus ride again.

/c’est fin!

the year of the WHOLE damn bottle.

since we are smack in the middle of prime hibernation time, i spend a lot of time at home overthinking just about everything. just last night i heard a strange noise coming from some other part of the house while i knew i was home alone. i laid there for a few minutes, my heart beating out of my chest, listening, imagining. it most DEFINITELY had to be a person who broke in through a second floor window… or possibly somebody who’d scaled the front of the house and was now in my livingroom, stealing my precious computer as i laid there in the fetal position. i contemplated how i could manage to hide in the giant pile of laundry in my bedroom while keeping george from giving us away… the likelihood of this seemed improbable, at best. in the end, i poked my head out of my bedroom door and down the hall, george following behind me, his snoring echoing through the eerie quiet. though i could see no sign of a burgler and my computer was still in it’s right place, i opted to lock my bedroom door before getting back into bed. crisis averted… for now.

now as exciting as having a chronically over active imagination can sometimes be, it can also be a complete and utter drag. i play out every possible scenario to any situation that could possibly arise in my head. these inner dialogues take up much of my time and in real life i never usually get to act any of them out. (real life is so much less dramatic. *sigh*) lately my mind has been consumed with the topic ‘ things that i do on a consistent basis that do not fufill my needs, aka- things that make me a giant chump.’

my life up until this point has been a pretty consistently unfulfilling existence, and i think it’s safe to say that it’s just  become ‘normal’ to me to continuously do things that leave me feeling unsatisfied and pissed off. i can’t blame anybody else for this since drawing the short stick is what you get when you agree to leave things up to chance. the point being- if you wan to be in control of anything in your life, you’ve gotta grab that gigantic bull by it’s big, pointy bull horns and tell it (quite expressly) to get fucked and then stop answering it’s calls and agreeing to send it nudes (what?!). however, as good as i am at making things seem so rational and easy, i really suck at following my own advice.

this year, i hope i can help myself to make better choices by considering the following analogy- if i ordered a bottle of gin and i was given a shot- would i be okay with that? NO. i would not. i would send that goddamn shot back and tell the server that if i wanted a shot, i’d have poured myself one from my BOTTLE. I WANTED THE WHOLE BOTTLE, DAMMIT. and in the same way, i can apply the same logic to other areas of my life and hopefully be able to deduce more easily whether i should be sending that shit back to the kitchen or not. is it EVERYTHING i wanted? is it what i expected? am i being hosed? am i getting as much back as i put in? is the bottle of gin using me for sex? i know this is going to require being more of a bitch than i am normally accustomed to, and i guess that’s okay. it’s easier than being nicer. because really, even 10 nights worth of bad sleep spent on your own is better than one spent beside someone who couldn’t give two fucks about you in the first place, right? RIGHT.

because you know what? I WANT THE WHOLE FRIGGIN’ BOTTLE. i DESERVE the whole bottle. i might not necessarily NEED the whole bottle and it will likely end in tears and passing out eating corn chips.. but that is a risk i am willing to take!  i’m tired of wasting my money on  shots and mixed drinks and remembering everything the next day. 2011 is the year of the WHOLE DAMN BOTTLE and whatever that glorious bottle may bring, just you wait and see.