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Thank goodness the poor girl felt better the next day, otherwise this trip would have gotten deathly boring. We hopped out of bed at noon and went to a small bakery nearby to have the obligatory bagel breakfast. Afterwards, we just wasted several hours back at the house, staring at the walls and having a deep conversation until it was time to hit another train into the city. We were set to see Kelly again, but this time we'd be joined by Ty (my cousin, who I haven't seen in a long time) and Aroon, who came into the city for a couple days before spending spring break in Texas. We all found each other at Hakata, a sushi restaurant at 38th and Broadway. The dinner was good, if a bit ordinary. Afterwards, Ruthie, Aroon and I split off from the group and were off for the night to a show. Avenue Q completely rocked the boat. From there, we found our way to a bar on the way to the train station where we found a bunch of college ball fans celebrating Syracuse's win in the conference tournament.

So this is New York. My only experience here was 5 days out of a ritzy hotel next to Grand Central, and I experienced very little of the actual city. My serious, academic motive for being out here is to find out about the schools and the cities to get a feel for whether I could go to school for 3 years here. Not exactly helpful, then, that I arrive to a small town on Long Island and get picked up by Ruthie and Renee, who are residents of SmallTown, USA. Seriously, lots of LI looks exactly like you think a small town in the northeast should look after seeing plenty of cheesy romantic comedies. Going by The Car Scale™, this is one of the richest cities I've ever seen. This place ***loves*** their German cars. It's an extension of the Keeping Up With The Joneses game they play here - adjacent driveways will have identically-equipped A8s or 750s with different colors. The roads are filled with all sorts of BMWs, Mercs and Porsches to the point of saturation.

After a stop for some NY-style pizza (I still find it lacking flavor), we wind up at the house where I'm staying, and it's an interesting experience. The two girls live with their father, who's deaf, and a grandmother who, bless her heart, is 92. When they asked me the usual questions like where I'm from, how I knew Ruthie, etc., Ruthie had to play translator for virtually all my conversations.

Later that night, Ruthie and I hopped on a train for the hour-long ride into Manhattan. Upon arrival, we took a handful of subways until we wound up in the museum district, where I found my cousin Kelly waiting outside the Guggenheim. All of us were bound for the party going on inside the museum. It was one of the cooler parties I'd seen. It was in celebration of an exhibit of a mid-20th-century sculptor, so all of that stuff was visible alongside a bar and the swingin' sounds of DJ Spooky, who knew how to rock an art party. It was a fine time, but Ruthie fell sick so we took off early.

I was supposed to start writing something interesting and introspective, commenting on how familiar I feel with travel, layovers, hours of isolation marked by useless conversations, and so on. But something much more interesting just happened as I sit here on the floor of a Chicago airport during a 2-hour-plus layover, laptop plugged into the wall and me writing out of boredom with emulation.

An elderly Asian woman, slumped back in a wheelchair, was wheeled into the gate where I'm sitting. A young airport employee was very kind and spoke slowly, saying, "Just wait here until the men come to get you, OK? You have a nice day now." For a second, I was mistaking it for Southern hospitality. Thinking nothing of it, I went back to the computer, only to see 30 seconds later that the woman just got up out of her wheelchair and walked right off. Shopping bags in hand. In fact, she wasn't even elderly. I mean, this was on the same league as the Dane Cook rant about the guy who gets hit by a car and just walks it off. Except this woman didn't walk anything off except herself.

It was the last lecture ever for a Plan II program that was called Perspectives - it was a panel discussion, featuring lots of high-profile profs from differing fields - that had a different theme every semester. This one was 'creativity.' So for one night, a math prof would talk about what creativity meant to him, and the next night would be one from a psych prof, and so on.

Today had 3 lecturers. One was a musician, interestingly the guy who had been my brother's mentor during his Ph.D. stay here. The other was a poet and the head of something at the LBJ Presidential Library, and it was cool to see that put to use - we got to hear recordings of LBJ wheeling and dealing, and even planning strategic stuff with MLK himself. Very cool stuff. But the really interesting part was when she played a clip from former Senator Bill Bradley's radio show on XM. The story was amusing in itself, but at the end, she said, with little adieu, "and here's Senator Bradley himself!"

All of us were in shock. God damn, it rocks being in Plan II.

For the uninitiated: Bill Bradley, former senator from New Jersey, 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, former pro/Olympic basketball player and Rhodes scholar. In every sense of the word, a baller.

So he gets up and decides he'll chime in on the creativity theme. He decides he'll tell a few sample stories from his basketball and political lives as examples. The best one is as follows:

Going into the Olympics, the US was expected to go up against the Soviet Union in basketball, which was a highly anticipated matchup. Before leaving, Bradley asked a Russian prof at Princeton (where he attended) for a phrase to give to the Russians in case the Russians were ruffians. The phrase he got in exchange was roughly translated as "Hey, big guy, watch out." The match came around, and Bradley was matched up against a 6'7" guy who wasn't afraid to throw them 'bows. Once, this elbow caught Bradley right between the collarbones, and it knocked him down, and along with it he lost his wind and his voice. He collected himself, got up, and very sternly said his line in Russian to the guy who knocked him down.

This threw the Russians in for a loop.

Not because them was fightin' words, but until that point in the game, the Russians had been communicating their plays verbally. They took it to mean that Bradley understood all the Russian they had been saying, so they had to stop communicating their plays.

The Americans proceeded to win the gold medal.

Between attending the class like usual, seeing Bradley 35 feet away, singing my lungs out in a room full of awful musicians, talking to a P2 alum who had lived in Japan, and getting a date with a salsa dancer, I had a fantastic Wednesday. How was yours?

For the last month, school was hell. I mean, it really sucked. Tests, papers, more tests, etc. etc. etc. I really had time for virtually nothing, and I was miserable. As of last Thursday, though, that all ended - so I've been bored as hell ever since, because all my friends are still working (or, in the case of my roommates, addicted to WoW).

So now this week of school is like the kind you get right before a holiday, where it's really easy and everyone's in the mood to get the hell out. Just two more days of class and I'm free and off to NY! For those keeping score at home, here's what I'm doing:

Friday the 10th: off to NY. Staying with Ruthie on Long Island. Chill.
Saturday: Chill in NY, hook up with Aroon, see Avenue Q. Insanity will ensue.
Sunday: Chill in NY.
Monday: Off to Boston! The lovely Kathy is putting me up, and hopefully I can bug her into showing me a little bit of life at Harvard - when everyone's not studying.
Tuesday: More Boston. Visiting Harvard Law. Chill more.
Wednesday: Back to NY for one more day.
Thursday: Get up ass early, get back to Austin in the afternoon. Hook up with Aroon, Ale, Greg, and possibly Harsimar and start rocking out.

Sunday: Rocking out concludes. I start doing research.

And there we have it! I'll be on the computer less for the next couple weeks, but I'm reachable by all the usual methods.