I scream, you scream, we all scream for fro-yo!

Did you miss me?  I can't believe it's been three weeks since my last post.  But honestly, that's a good thing, cause that means I'm too busy actually living my life to sit around and post.  (Yeah, we're going with that reason.  It's not at all because I'm lazy...)

Soooooo, here are some highlights from my last few weeks:

• I have discovered my new addiction.  My drug of choice can be found at any Pinkberry location, in the form of an original frozen yogurt with strawberry and chocolate chips.  You guys, it's like deliciously tart crack.  With chocolate chips on top.  In a word, it's AWESOME.
• I recently went to the Museum of Natural History with my brother, which was really cool.  They have a dinosaur exhibit that is laid out so that if you follow the arrows that are painted on the floor, you progress through the evolutionary timeline of the dinosaurs.  Along the way, it lets you know what anatomical characteristic has been developed.  Unfortunately, we had to cut our Darwinian trip short because we both had things to do.  Our moment of departure?  The placenta!
• I started my student teaching a couple of weeks ago.  I'm in a kindergarten classroom with 24 kids, and today we got a new student.  He just arrived in the US from Korea two weeks ago, and he doesn't speak a word of English.  Can you imagine?  The amazing thing is that this kid immediately jumped right into the thick of things, participating in lessons and playing with the other kids.  Kid, you seriously rock.  I wanna be like you when I grow up.
• And last but certainly not least, I finally did laundry tonight (only because I was down to my last pair of clean underwear.  If you didn't pick up earlier--I'm LAZY) and I am currently lying down on my freshly cleaned bedsheets.  I tell ya, there are few things in this world that feel better than lying on clean sheets.  Now if only I could get some Pinkberry.....

New York, New Yooooooork!

You guys, I feel like I had an iconic New York City kind of day today.  Seriously, I was just a step away from donning my tap shoes and singing through the streets, a la Frank Sinatra.  Let me break it down for you: I started off the day by meeting my dad for brunch (otherwise known as the AWESOME meal) at his hotel, which happened to be situated directly across the street from the south side of Central Park [New York icon #1].  I even walked past all those cheesy horse-drawn carriages [NY icon #2] that sit outside the entrance to the park, in the hopes to convince some tourist couple to spend a gazillion dollars to sit directly behind a smelly bag of horse poop and pretend that it's a romantic thing to do.

[ahem] where was I?  Ok, so I had brunch with my dad, then walked over to the nearest Duane Reade pharmacy [NY icon #3] to pick up some shampoo.  And as I left the drug store, I figured, what the hell--it's a pain in the ass to get from the west side to the east side of the city, so I may as well enjoy it while I'm here.  So, I decided to walk 25 blocks to the Met [NY icon #4].

I should probably note that in the past two days, I have been to more art museums than I've visited in the last 6 years (yesterday my dad and brother went with me to the MoMA), so I'm a little out of practice.  I went into it worried about going too fast through the exhibits (and therefore showing my lack of interest and/or artistic taste), but also thinking that I would feel stupid if I stood in front of a painting and stared for too long (causing people to wonder what the hell I'm doing looking at a solid block of color for half an hour).  Anyway, it turns out that I loved both of my museum trips.  Yesterday's trip to the MoMA with my family was great, in that we could talk about the different paintings and sculptures that we saw.

While I was at the MoMA, I picked the poster of this
Picasso painting as my first addition to the bare walls of my
dorm room.   I'm telling you, it's a million times more
powerful in person.  It seriously took my breath away.

But today was wonderful, too, in a different way.  When I walked into the Met, I slipped my headphones into my ears and let my random mix of classical music drown out the sounds of all the other people in the museum.  Now, I have to say that I preferred the MoMA to the Met, only because I don't have that much interest in old paintings of upper class Europeans.  But there was still some amazing stuff.  And holy crap, is that place huge.  I definitely got turned around multiple times during my visit, but who cares?  What better place to get lost than a museum?  No matter where you go, you're going to see interesting things.

I picked a print of this Van Gogh painting as my souvenir from
 the Met.  Again, it's a painting that has more impact in person.

All in all, it was a great day.  I swear, all I needed was to walk down 5th Avenue and window shop at Tiffany's and I would morph into Audrey Hepburn.  I should start wearing pearls and full-sleeve gloves...

Close Encounters with big guys and the Big Guy

So I walked over to the gym on Columbia's main campus today, and a couple things happened:

As I was making my way through campus, a very nice looking girl stopped me and asked if I would join a Bible study group she was starting.  Of course, I had to first take my headphones out of my ears to hear what she was trying to ask me.  The song I paused in order to politely decline the invitation?  "Move Bitch" by Ludacris.  Yikes.  That probably means I'm not really the demographic this girl is going for...

Ok, so then I go into the fitness center, and I'm sort of wandering around this huge maze of a building looking for the treadmills and elliptical machines, trying to act casual enough about it so that I don't look like I'm a newbie (which means that I refuse to ask for help, since that would only reinforce the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing).  At one point I'm waiting to get onto an elevator, when the doors open and what looks like half of the Columbia football team pours out.  Honestly, it might have only been a few of the guys, but they're so big that I feel like they should count as more people.  Anyway, I suddenly realized that I've never stood directly next to a college-level football player.  Dude, those guys are HUGE.  I don't even think they saw me standing there; their eye level is about a foot and a half over my head.  Look, I am constantly feeling like a little person in a big world, but I have never felt as tiny as I did today surrounded by these guys.  I think if they really wanted to, they could probably crumple me up and throw me away like a discarded piece of paper.  Scary.

Hello, Bed Bath and Beyond? I'm looking for the Beyond section...

Ok, so as you may know, I just moved into my on-campus housing this past weekend.  I have to confess, I sort of feel like I'm regressing a little bit; my room definitely has an undergrad dorm room feel to it.  Ugly furniture, twin bed, blank beige walls, institutional lighting.  Yuck.  I've made some feeble attempts to give it some color and character (translation: I bought a comforter for my bed.  not really an earth-shattering addition) but I seriously need to access my inner HGTV design diva and give this room a makeover.

Part of the problem is that I'm hesitant to buy a lot of furniture and stuff--I already have a bunch of apartment accessories, since I lived in Delawhere for 2 years.  The thing is that a lot of it is at my parents' place, and I'm having a hard time getting it up to New York.  In the meantime, I had a somewhat brilliant idea:

One perk of being a TC student is that you can get a sticker for your school ID that gets you into all the NYC museums for free.  I KNOW!  How awesome is that?  So here's what I'm thinking--I want to hit up a few places that I've been dying to go to (The MoMA, The Met, The Guggenheim) and at each place I'll buy a poster of a painting that I saw that day that I liked.  I'll get cheap frames for them, and stick the posters up on my wall.  Cool, right?  Right?  Guys?

...Look, I'm working on a limited budget and an even more limited sense of style and interior decorating skills.  This is all I got.  Work with me, people.