I love coffee, and when the weather gets particularly warm I make the switch over to iced coffee — never mind the fact that I have been told for years that you should drink hot drinks when it is hot outside and cool drinks when it is cool. I prefer a cold drink. For the most part I have almost always gotten both kinds of coffee from Starbucks, which is quite easy when you’re in Manhattan — there is almost always one or five within a few blocks of your location.
I have a variation on the following conversation each evening after I finish teaching. I enter my local deli, order my standard vegetable sandwich, and the sandwichmaker grills me about my soup choices. It doesn’t seem to matter to him that I don’t ever want the soup — even when they have vegetable soup, I don’t want soup because the soup is too salty — and every time he presses me into taking soup I do not want or need. The deli is the only place that’s open late by the time I get home and they do make a delicious veggie sandwich.
On Monday evening, I attended a concert at the Bowery Ballroom — it was The Mountain Goats with opening band Matthew E. White. There were a number of occasions when I could not help but notice people being not just a little impolite but outright rude and I think that it is high time that you, if you are unaware, learn exactly how, you too, can join the ranks of people being rude at concerts.
Starbucks are supposed to be the “third place” — after home and work — where you go to relax and enjoy your life. Starbucks also sells their service as the place where you can make really specific drink orders and have them fulfilled with glee and not hostile resentment.
Today, I am going to share with you my ongoing and miserable experience with a particular Starbucks store in Midtown Manhattan that just plain out refuses to correctly make my drinks order — even though they’re the ones who taught me precisely how to order my drink!
The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, has passed some excellent legislature in his time in office. As a person interested in good health, I was pleased to see the ban on trans fat in restaurant food as well as the bans on smoking in an increasing number of places and the proposed ban on the sale of larger sizes of soda, which serve no purpose other than to expand the pocketbooks of the sellers and the waistlines of the consumers while cutting down on their lifeline.
I had a couple of hours to kill last night in Greenwich Village in New York City, and I enjoyed walking everywhere — including Cornelia Street and the temporary Apple SoHo store at 72 Greene Street — to relive some beloved, old, memories of living in that neighborhood years ago. Another regular, old, haunt of mine was NYU’s beautiful Bobst library. It had been awhile since I’d been in Bobst with a WiFi device and so last night I decided to do some testing with my new iPhone 4S and iPad 2 — and the results were amazing!
Yesterday, I decided to test the new “In-Store Personal Pickup” option Apple is now offering customers when you order from the online Apple Store. I had to take the iPad 2 plunge — times two! — and I placed a nine-item order online at 10:30am in the morning and planned to pick up everything from the 14th Street Apple Store in New York City when I finished teaching later that night.
We are in the crest of a crime spree in New York City and I’m wondering why this is happening now. Is the economy finally so poor and far-reaching that the forgotten and misbegotten are now finally rising up from the streets to take back what was lost in this economic downturn?
A 400 percent increase in murders in tony Williamsburg; a 400 percent increase in rapes in Sheepshead Bay and a 250 percent increase in killings in Washington Heights are all troublesome statistics that have Mayor Michael Bloomberg and police officials concerned.
“We worry every day about trying to make this city safer,” Mayor Bloomberg said Monday.
One of the greatest things about living and working in New York City is seeing real life happenings that look like staged events. Janna and I are currently teaching together in Manhattan, and all Summer we have had the pleasure to watch — from our classroom perch on West 40th Street — weekly group Yoga sessions in Bryant Park. Last night after the final class, I flung open the window and took this image. You can see the Bryant Park carousel in the foreground and at least 300 yoga students congregating and sprawling on yoga mats on the green. The students change poses in unison. It’s like watching a beautiful, magical, dance from afar between the trees.
In an amazingly horrible PR spin — not unlike Renaming the Slaughterhouse — the big soda pop makers are fighting the New York City ban on using Federal welfare money on sugary drinks – because, I guess, the Sugar Pimps want our kids unhealthy and fat.
Janna and I are delighted to announce we will be teaching our “Hardcore ASL” style of American Sign Language as a new series of American Sign Language courses offered by CUNY-SPS — the City University of New York’s School of Professional Studies in the Off-Camps College.
There’s an old saying in the New York City Morningside Heights neighborhood — “The Widest Street in the World is West 120th Street.” — and the significance of that chestnut is that West 120th Street is the “dividing line” between Columbia College and Teachers College at Columbia University.
Yesterday, in my — Muslim Women Conundrum — article, I lamented the fact that the women dropped a class I was teaching because of their fear of being touched by a man. Commenter “nosleepingdog” said this, in the replies stream:
We should remember though that the ultimate enforcers of these strictures are Islamic men. A woman who is accused of having deliberately put herself in a position where a man might touch her, may be beaten, disowned, raped, or killed. Very logical. Does make one wonder. Even questioning the authority of the rules and the enforcers is a crime.
That point made me think about the real roots of this masked problem of oppression, and I recalled a story my wife shared with me this week that draws a deeper, and more widespread — and certainly more pernicious! — example of how men have, and still do, try to actively control women. Even women they do not know.
The weekend snowstorm that tackled us into Monday opened 23 inches of Whoopass here in Jersey City, and many pockets of humanity in and around the Tri-State area are still trying to dig out of the drifts. We lost power several times Sunday and Monday and lots of neighborhood trees were tipped into felling by the heavy, wet, snow. Streets are still unplowed. Sidewalks are still impassable. It’s a winter whiteout of neighborhood morality and city leadership.
