Blogher 10: Part Two: New York State Of Mind

...and I would think to myself:  Even the vegetables in New York are better.  It's not just the vegetables, of course.  I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance....

Nora Ephron, Heartburn

I love New York.   My heart did a little dance as the plane landed.  But I see I'm skipping over a tale which will help you understand just what a friendly, gregarious, nosy, and suspicious person I am.  I started talking to a nice lady in the Columbia airport who was flying to a modeling convention with her daughter Crystal and the cost was being picked up by the modeling agency and they were staying in a downtown hotel and neither of them had been out of South Carolina before, let alone on a plane to New York.   I took her email address and I hoped that things would go well.

New York requires you to undergo a complete personality change from South Carolina.  Well, except that if you're me you have this incredible and uncontrollable compulsion to talk to everybody and anybody and sometimes that works in NYC and sometimes it doesn't but you'd be surprised that most people wandering around the city are just like anybody else, although when I first started to visit I thought they were all ultra sophisticated and fashionable and certainly much cooler than a country bumpkin like me.

Not really.

So here I was in LaGuardia broke, disabled, and trying to save money every way I could.  So I made a decision that certainly could be used as evidence against me in my sanity hearing.  I decided to take a bus into the city.  Now I'm totally familiar with how to get where I need to go if I arrive in Newark, New Jersey which sounds strange but it's actually much easier to get into the city from there....but I had never landed in LaGuardia before.  For some reason Priceline's flights into Newark were like $500 as opposed to $250 for LaGuardia.

I'll cut to the chase:  I ended up meeting a woman who was going to be on the Today show in 2 days, who rode the bus with me into the city and then we took the subway and she carried my suitcase which weighed approximately eleven hundred pounds up four flights of steps and I want to publicly thank you, Camille Terry, for helping me out.

I eventually landed at my cousin's apartment smelling like I'd been dumpster diving forscraps in the 100 degree temperature.  She lives on E. 25th street in an apartment that she & her husband rented in 1965.  It's a huge apartment for New York City and even has a large balcony.  My cousin, Sally, is 85 and still works 2-3 days a week as a librarian and is truly one of the most wonderful people in the universe.   I arrived at her doorman building (love doormen) and we went out to eat at a diner that reminded me of the Seinfeld one.

So I got up to NYC on Sunday August 1 and the Blogher convention didn't start until Friday, August 6, because I knew I would need to rest.  And that's what I did all day Sunday and Monday.  Rested.   Because that's what you do when you have fibromyalgia.  And NYC was calling to me and the best ethnic restaurants in the world and dear friends were only a few blocks or miles away instead of 800 miles away and all I could do is lie on the sofa and sulk. 

I got up on Tuesday, though.....and I took a lot of pictures with my camera but I've lost the cord that connects it to the computer and I've ordered a replacement because they wanted $52.00 for a bunch of cords all together at Best Buy which seemed a little high to me so as soon as the cord arrives from the online store I'll show you pictures of the city, because nobody has ever thought to photograph it before and you're probably curious what it looks like....so stay tuned.