L'histoire de sa vie

For the next two days I’ll be in the Finger Lakes region of New York touring vineyards. As a result, my “day off” will be Friday. And since I never post on Saturday, that means this is the fifth post for the week. Come back on Sunday!

So I write a lot of posts about doughnuts. There’s pretty much no question that I have an obsession. Of course, this is what happens when you grow up surrounded by the delicious tastes of Shipley Do-Nuts. As a result, and since I have strong opinions on pretty much everything, I have a strong opinion on New York doughnuts, which is this: they mostly suck.

I’ve railed against Dunkin Donuts and celebrated the Donut Pub, but the fact remains that there pretty much is no doughnut in New York even close to as good as Shipley. This was further proven by my trip Wednesday to the Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side.

The doughnut plant has cute decorations, little ceramic donut-shapes in the windowsill, but that’s pretty much where the excitement (if you can call it that) stops. I tried two doughnuts, a “shamrock” doughnut (glazed with a random shamrock on it) and a “carrot cake” doughnut.

The reason for these choices is that I was on a food tour and that’s what was provided. Nonetheless, I was disappointed. The carrot cake doughnut was no good, but I didn’t expect it to be. The issue is the shamrock. A glazed doughnut should be the signature doughnut of a doughnut shop. It should be the best they offer, because it’s the most fundamental and likely the most ordered. When I go to Shipley, I always get some ridiculous doughnut, in addition to at least one regular glazed doughnut.

This glazed doughnut, however, was not so great. It was okay and perhaps if it were melting hot it would be even better, but as it was, I’m still on the quest to find good doughnuts in New York City.

Last night, I saw A Behanding in Spokane on Broadway, starring Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell (from The Green Mile, among others). First of all, the show was hilarious and quite awesome. Second of all, Christopher Walken is awesome.

Seriously, the guy cracks me up. When I drove to Chippewa Falls last summer, I had no choice but to recall his scene in Annie Hall, and on a semi-weekly basis his performance in Pulp Fiction is discussed.

But in both of those cases, Walken is a minor character with only a little screen time. His interesting voice and personality is only presented for a short time. But in Behanding, we got a full ninety minutes complete with Walken, tons of time listening to him be ridiculously awesome with his seriously amazing voice.

If you have a chance to see the show before it ends and before Walken leaves the cast, see it. You will not be disappointed.

Yesterday I finally completed (after nearly three years in NYC) my tour de boroughs by visiting Staten Island, the fifth borough, the one on which I had previously hoped never to step foot.

Unfortunately, fate was not too kind, and because my brother desired to see the Statue of Liberty, we took the Staten Island Ferry and found ourselves trapped in Staten Island for thirty minutes before another ferry took us back to pleasant, clean(er) Manhattan.

Staten Island actually smells like garbage, which is what I expected. Upon reaching the island, I was amazed that the stories of Staten Island being basically just a landfill (there’s even an ice cream flavor called Staten Island Landfill) were true.

Hopefully those thirty minutes will be the only time in my life I have to visit Staten Island. That’s approximately a whopping 0.00025% of my life thus far, a 0.00025% I will never get back.

So a bunch of magazines, including Time Out NY, suggest that the best burger in New York is that of Shake Shack. Now, since the same issue also suggested that Do the Right Thing was the “quintessential New York movie,” and since I didn’t think it was that great, I had my doubts.

Nonetheless, I finally made it to Shake Shack yesterday. Their shakes were good but a little too sweet for my taste. The burger, however, was a different story. Simply put, it was delicious.

I mean, a burger is a burger, but this was in fact a really good burger. Every part of it was about as close to perfection as one could expect. My high expectations were met, something that so rarely happens.

I’ll probably go back soon. Because even though it’s forty blocks away from here, it’s delicious and therefore worth the trip.

My brother is in town, and since it’s his first trip to New York City, we’re doing all kinds of great stuff. Today he got his first “New York Transit Sucks” experience. Here’s how it went down:

We were on the F train because apparently the D is not running this weekend between 34th Street and Pacific Street. (Where is that even? Brooklyn? Come on.) Anyway, we were at West 4th Street, attempting to get back to Harold Square. The train began and then suddenly, after only about ten feet of motion, screeched to a sudden halt. Many people fell over.

The train didn’t move, and after a couple minutes, the masses (we were packed in like sardines) were restless. About five minutes later, a voice came over the intercom to explain the situation: “The emergency brake was pulled. Transit Authorities are investigating the matter. We will move momentarily.”

About fifteen minutes later, the same announcement was repeated. My brother and I began joking about the situation:

Ben: What does that mean they’re investigating the situation? Are they gonna go around asking people, “did you pull the brake?” Or maybe they’re reviewing tapes!
Me: They’re dusting for prints! “They got us workin’ in shifts!” [Pass or Play?]

People around us started laughing. We kept joking about all of the train’s goings-on, and about ten minutes later, they made another announcement, explaining that there was no power between 4th and 14th and that they would (finally) open the doors (we were still at the platform the whole time!) and let us out.

In combination with the ridiculous rain and wind we suffered, Ben’s only reaction was, and I quote: “Unbelievable.”

This is the final post from my week of hell. Midterms are over, I’m ready to relax, and I’m ready to rejoin the real world. Spring break begins now. My family is coming in. I’ll have plenty to talk about. But for now, this final brief post:

As part of my job as a TA, today I joined the other seven TAs and our professor in grading the midterms that the students took yesterday. Actually, I helped proctor the exam itself with my fellow TA Greg. The two of us sat in front of the class and ran around answering questions whenever they arose. As a result, we had an intimate understanding of the exam when it came time to grade it.

However, that intimate understanding did not stop me from making a poor decision as to which section I’d like to grade and as a result, I stupidly chosen to grade the “find the bugs in this code” section as opposed to the “define these terms” section that others more wisely chose.

After about three hours, I finished grading my section. After four hours, the full grading was done. In between, we had pizza, and great conversation, because frankly Professor Cannon (the professor of this class) is awesome. And thus my week of hell ended, and spring break began.

During the last Woot-off I managed to score a sick shirt as well as my first “Bag of Crap.” For eight dollars, I got a box full of a bunch of odds and ends. Some are cool, some are useless, some are just ridiculous. Anyway, since it was only eight bucks, I cannot possibly complain. Here’s what I got, with pictures below.

• 2 “Camp Rock” Twin Bell Alarm Clocks (which I will mod by replacing the faces)
• A 4GB SanDisk Sansa e260 MP3 player (which I’m giving to my mother who has a need for such a device)
• A Brother Label Maker (with which I have no idea what I’ll do)
• A Picnic basket that unzips into a picnic mat (which I will use in Central Park in the near future, once it’s officially warm enough)
• A “Flush Light” light-up flusher for a toilet (??)

 

During my Midterm week of hell, my posts are a little shorter:

It snowed in NYC pretty hard on February 26, eleven days ago. It was a ridiculous snowstorm, called by the media various nicknames such as Snowmageddon and Snowpocalypse. Because I don’t fare well in snow, I got sick.

But that’s not the point. I am now recovered from my illness. It’s in the 50s outside and I’m not wearing my puffy jacket anymore. It’s going to rain tomorrow. Spring has all but officially sprung.

Yet there are still, eleven days later, mounds of snow, covered with all kinds of nasty, all over the streets. This is ridiculous. Examples below:

First of all, let me say that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin may be the worst hosts I’ve ever seen. It was painful at times and even worse the rest of the time to watch them up there, thinking they were funny, being so unfunny.

Every year when I watch the Oscars, my favorite part is the “Death Reel” where they go through the list of all the important people who died since the last Oscars. This year they left out Farrah Fawcett but included some Public Relations guy.

This is the reason why it’s my favorite part. Every year I call my mom and we laugh about whichever the most ridiculous tribute was. PR was it this year. We always joke that they left out our favorite late Key Grip or Best Boy or Caterer.

After all, if some PR guy can make the cut, how come the 2nd Assistant Cameraman can’t?

I have to say James Taylor was not the best choice, as he managed to turn a beautiful song into a boring lullaby. Between his performance and Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, it was a shame there weren’t a few more names in the memorial montage.

A week of hell is about to begin, unparalleled by any midterms I’ve had before. I’ve stated many times that this semester is my hardest and will be so, but it’s not just a couple really hard classes. It’s also the workload from all of my different classes.

This week alone I have two database assignments, an OS assignment, a Computers and Society paper, an Astronomy Midterm, and an OS midterm. I have papers to grade for tomorrow, midterms to grade on Thursday, and at least two of the assignments above are group assignments, meaning I also have to work within the schedules of others.

It’s bad news. Even writing this is a way of taking a break from one of my database assignments, which I’m going to get right back to in a few minutes.

I won’t say that you shouldn’t expect the quality of posts to drop this week, because that’s pretty much inevitable. However, I will attempt to trade off size instead. So hopefully this week will be filled by good but short posts. Stay tuned.