It’s Friday, and I’ve spent much more time pondering this week than writing, but sitting here with my cup of tea this afternoon I figured I’d type at you in the nonsensical way you can get away with when blaming your waning attention span on Friday afternoon and mild exhaustion. Friday is, after all, mostly a state of mind, much more than New York, if I do say so myself.
Speaking of New York, Mr. Brain and I are planning an East Coast road trip in the near future which could plausibly send us straight down 95 through New York City. I gently suggested a possible jaunt in the city, to which the response was something akin to a grunt. No one ever wants to drive through cities, but I find this completely unwarranted because in all my years being in and around major cities I can say with actual experience under my belt that cities are the easiest possible places to drive. They are laid out in perfectly logical grids with alternating one way streets, making them entirely predictable and navigable without much assistance. The only real argument is likely traffic, but if you’re in the city you’re just going more slowly, which seems better to me than being stuck with crazies on a highway doing 70-80 mph. Really it’s the traffic around the city that’s the problem, and also possibly confusing routes in and out. Have you ever tried to drive north out of St. Louis? There’s a point at which six interstates converge. Good luck getting out of that without a native co-pilot!
It’s probably some kind of sacrilege to go to New York these days without seeing Hamilton, per a conversation with my mother-in-law about her own upcoming trip to the Big Apple, and I’m confessing here that I am very, very late to this party, as in I haven’t read, listened, or watched yet. After spending a few hours earlier this week doing a very adult thing, making a budget, I vowed to stop spending money on frivolous things, so I put on my big girl pants and requested the recording from our local library. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the joy that is the library queue, but if you request something new and exciting you’ll find yourself in a queue so long that by the time you get the item you requested you’ve forgotten what it is or why you were interested. So, who knows when I will actually listen, and I’m a little confused about the relationship between the musical and the book, as the musical has been out for a while and the book was just released. Is the book about the musical? Help. I’m also leery of a pop cultural rendition of this history, which isn’t to say I know it at all and can speak to any inaccuracies, just that I’m nervous about it in the same way I’d be nervous if someone told me they watched Amadeus and had a thorough understanding of Mozart and his music. On the other hand, if we’re going to be talking about pop culture, than it seems okay that this feels more substantive than most other things, and there is also the fact that it is a Broadway musical and not something in the digital sphere. I have written all this with only a very cursory knowledge/awareness of it, and perhaps I will sing a different tune once I’ve experienced it in some way.
When I haven’t been thinking about things connected to New York, I have done some good reading lately. Last weekend I managed to devour Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words, which ending up being thought provoking in ways I hadn’t expected. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around how I want to write about this, hence the silence about it thus far. I also started to read Big Girls Don’t Cry, Rebecca Traister’s book about women, culture, and feminism surrounding the 2008 election. I’m not very far into this yet, but my interest has been piqued by what I’ve read.
Now that I’ve managed this lovely splattering, it’s getting closer to my absolute favorite time of the week, the ever coveted, not usually exclusive, Friday happy hour. I know what they say, that it’s always happy hour somewhere, but it’s not always Friday happy hour somewhere. It’s that whole state of mind thing, but it’s more than that. Friday is also a reason, the electric pull from Monday to denim clad abandon. On that note, happy Friday.
*Photo credit: kaysha
