Looks like I might be going to New York for the second half of February. Still pretty tentative and there’s probably a 50% chance it’ll all fall through.
Did I ever tell you how much I hate flying?
Usually a flight consists of 5 minutes of terror, 50 minutes of boredom and 5 minutes of terror. That’s pretty much all of my flying for the last five years – because it’s all been short haul trips to London or Paris.
I’ve been to the U.S. twice before, once to GA and the second time to NC.
Very different experiences – the first was family, Six Flags, Stone Mountain, The Fourth of July, fireworks, my utter infatuation with a very pretty girl and my heart being broken when she told me we could be “friends”. I hadn’t yet figured out that a 14 year old boy with freckles has a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than scoring with a 17 year old girl who had a car. Go figure.
The second time was an invite from friends, a little love, a lot of heartbreak, missing my home terribly and a whole load of situations that I handled really badly. I met my first gay person and realised that I, and everyone I was friends with, had no idea what a gay person actually was. As I recall, he was funny, geeky and the first American I’d ever known to employ sarcasm and irony correctly. I hope he’s a professor somewhere. Teaching sarcasm or something. The only thing I sorta kept from those days was my friendship with Melody, one of the main reasons I went there. She’s incredibly patient, incredibly empathic, generous to the point of self-destruction and deserving of a Nobel prize based on the work she does. I was 20 and it was a long time ago. America is a very different place now.
Both times, of course, were punctuated by 5 minutes of terror, 7 hours of boredom and developing deep-vein thrombosis and 5 minutes of terror. The GA trip was even more special as we flew into Kennedy and then had to get a connecting flight to Atlanta. Joy!
I spent 8 weeks in GA and 6 weeks in NC. I’ll be spending 2 weeks in NY and if I’m honest I don’t want to go. I’m only into the new house, I don’t want to miss my kids for that amount of time. When I visit a new place I do go out and see the sights but hey I’ll just be yet another itinerant Irish tourist in New York. Nothing special about me.
But upwards and outwards. I just hope my iPods and laptops are up the challenge (battery-wise).
Anyone interested in meeting up should drop me a line. I know I’ll be busy but equally I know there are a lot of people in NY with whom I’ve had a fleeting acquaintance and it’d be good to meet up, chow down and help them realise that I really am as rude in real life as I am online but I don’t mean anything by it.
The plan is two weeks. That’s a lot of staring at hotel walls.