2. Yes, I know I am supposed to Love NY. But, really now. What’s to love?
3. I just spent the weekend there with Janet. No real agenda—just walking around looking at gardens. We spent a lot of time wandering around Central Park. I’d never been there before. It’s an impressive park. A very impressive park. It’d be incredibly nice if there were about 75% fewer people and not all the traffic noise. But, even still, the design of that park is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I could spend hours just wandering around studying that park.
4. We also walked over to Highline Park. That was also a pretty impressive idea. It’s an old elevated train line converted into a walkway with plants growing on either side along the whole way. It is one of those terribly clever ideas that makes me wonder how it ever got through the layers of bureaucracy to be put into place. Whoever came up with that idea was a genius.
5. We also strolled through large chunk of the city. Janet kept asking me in which neighborhood I would want to live. I learned it is vital in Manhattan to declare oneself as an uptown, midtown or downtown person, and even that isn’t enough, you need to pick a section within the preferred region. Deciding where to live in Manhattan, let alone in New York City, sounds like a psychological test.
6. I have no idea where I would want to live in NYC. It’s a decent place to wander around with one’s wonderful wife for a weekend, but I wouldn’t like to live there.
7. We had dinner one night at the best Indian place I have been to outside of India. DhaBa. Highly recommended.
8. Our hotel room had the creepiest picture I have ever seen in a hotel. Janet didn’t think it was creepy at all, by the way—she just thought it was a good picture. But, she didn’t understand. It was a black and white photo of a statute on the top of one of the fountains in Central Park. (We saw the fountain in our journey in the park—it wasn’t creepy at all—but the picture was—I think the difference was that the photo was black and white.) The statue was an angel. Every time I saw it, I instantly thought, “Don’t Blink.” That thought just popped into the forefront of my brain; it wasn’t like I was trying to think about it on purpose, it just happened. So, imagine an otherwise really nice hotel room which generates an unconscious vague sense of dread every time you catch a glance of a picture in the corner of the room.
8. If that last paragraph made any sense at all to you, then you too are a Geek.
9. I tried to explain the horror described in item 8 to Janet; she just gave me one of those looks. My wife is not a Geek.
10. Speaking of which, Clara decided she didn’t want to see Captain America. Now my only hope is to find an empty time in Emma’s social calendar, which, to be honest, doesn’t seem likely. Sigh.
11. And, a book review because I am so far behind. I mentioned Henning Mankell a few months back. He is a Swedish mystery writer. I recently read Chronicler of the Winds. I enjoyed it, but I am not sure I would recommend it. It was well-written, and pretty interesting. (It’s not really a mystery novel though—so file this under “Genre Author Branching Out.”) The problem was I had a hard time keeping the story located where it was supposed to be located. It’s the story of a poor kid from a village in Africa, who ends up making his way alone in the Big City. It read like any of several Indian novels I have read. It wasn’t just the poor kid making his way in life that seemed Indian—for some reason, the very writing style reminded me of similar stories written by Indian authors about India. I can’t figure out why that connection seemed so strong to me. So, while reading it, I constantly had this feeling of disconnect—here I was reading a pleasant novel about a kid in India when suddenly there was some jarring reminder that, oh yeah, this is in Africa. (And, yes, I know that it is odd to compare India (a country) to Africa (a continent), but the country in Africa in which this novel takes place in unnamed—so blame the author for the “If you’ve seen one country in Africa, you’ve seen ‘em all” nature of the unspecified desperately poor African country torn apart by civil war setting.) In the end, I am not really sure what to make of this novel—I enjoyed reading it, but the most memorable things about the novel seem like Generic Memorable Things—a category I didn’t even realize existed until I typed that phrase.
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