Bryan’s Web (.net)

Introduction
He lives! I’m sorry about the lack of updates- I’ve been really busy and decided to make up for it with a giant blog entry. Hopefully there won’t be any further lapses this long, but I make no promises- the quarter only gets busier and busier from here on out! This blog entry has two large entries. The first is the story of my glorious return to administering my blog. The second is (finally) the story of our trip to New York (it’s filled with links. Watch out- they hunt in packs and have a six-inch retractable claw). Both of these took me a substantial amount of time to write, so I hope you enjoy!

The Return
The city was named, of all things, “bryansweb.net”. It had stood deserted for weeks, not a visitor in sight except for the hoard of penis-pill pushers and gambling promoters attacking the city- not with swords and siege engines, but with nails and advertisements (which, though not as damaging, are just as annoying). Every attempt, however, was turned away, and the nails left no mark on the city’s gleaming walls. For weeks upon weeks this continued, without change and without end.

Until one day -today- when a man appeared at the edge of the wood and gazed across the field at the edge of the forest and up to the city he once ruled. The man was tall and strong, but dirty, and around his limbs were four shackles from which little bits of chain still hung. Though bruised and battered, most of his wounds had healed during his long trek through the trees and the blood on his face had long since dried. With fire in his eyes and nothing but a key in his hand, he walked slowly and determinedly towards the city gates.

The attacking savages immediately sensed the stranger in their midst, and as they turned to attack him (spitting foul, unintelligible things like “C_1_A_L_1S”, “\/14GRa!”, and “Teha5_Ho|d_3m”), the man raised his key overhead and said four plain little words: “Mark all as Spam”. Suddenly, the key started to glow, and soon it was too bright to make out the word “Admin” engraved upon it. Yet it continued to get brighter still. When the white light subsided, the man stood alone in the field, refreshed, and soon returned to his slow march towards the gates.

Once there, he brought the key home- inserting it into its lock. Immediately, there was a click as the mechanism inside sensed its completeness and the gates began to recede. Soon they had opened far enough to reveal the figure of a small old man.

“Server, it is good to see you.” said the young man to the old, “But where are all the visitors?”

“It is good to see you too, Bryan” said Server. “They left soon after Christmas, soon after you were taken away. They stayed for a while, but one can only read the same text so many times without losing one’s mind.”

“Except for you, Server. You stood by me.”

“We had a contract, sir. I’ll not renege. Though I must say the job was an easy one- with no visitors to serve I had little to do. The walls held just fine against those invaders without any help from me.”

“To the composition room, then. I have much to write,” said Bryan, as they began walking towards the center of the city.

Soon they had entered the single, large room atop the central building. From the room, you could see for miles- almost to the horizon- through three large windows, each the width of the wall within which they were contained. The fourth wall was windowless, but was covered in what appeared to be a large sheet of paper- except it wasn’t ordinary paper, because it seemed to glow brighter than the light from any of the three windows. The room was sparsely decorated. There was no carpeting, but only a hard wood floor, and the only furniture in the room was a large pine desk and the chair that sat behind it. The desk was facing out the largest of the windows, with its back to the opaque wall. On it sat a pen and single piece of paper.

Server soon left the room, and as he closed the door behind him Bryan was left alone. He walked to the desk, pulled back the chair and sat down. As he picked up the pen, felt it’s weight in his hand, and paused to take in the scene around him, he felt a sense of normalcy that had been missing while he was away. Slowly but surely, he began to write. Though his words appeared on the paper on his desk, they also appeared on the wall behind him…

New York City
Our plan was to leave at about 7:00 on Sunday morning, but even though I was ready in time, and Roshan was ready on time, and Marc was ready on time, Ball (who was driving) didn’t get to our apartment until 8:00. Then we had to stop at a gas station, so we got on the road at about 8:30. We were afraid that we’d miss the show we had planned to see that night, but it was okay because we made the 10 hour (according to mapquest) trip in about 8.5 hours. We reached 110 mph at no less than 2 points in Pennsylvania. Downhill- I think that’s about all Ball’s Accord could handle. So we got to Roshan’s Uncle’s house and unloaded the car in plenty of time to have a quick, delicious dinner of Italian food before being driven to the bus stop and taking the bus into the city.

At this point, the subway workers were still working, so we took the subway from the bus station to our hotel, which was right across the street from the United Nations. After checking in (We told them there were only four people in the room and then snuck Marc in later), we headed off to the Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater to see if we could still get into the free show that started at 9:30 (but they started handing out tickets at 8:15). Everybody but me was certain that if we got there after 7:30 we wouldn’t get tickets. As it was, we got there at around 8:00 I think, and we waited until after 10:00 until they started letting us into the theater- standing room only. The A.S.S.S.S.C.A.T. show was just as hilarious, if not more so, than the special we saw on Bravo. It had several cast members of Saturday Night Live in it, and it was neat to see them in person. The SNL members performing were Seth Meyers, Rachel Dratch, and Amy Poehler. It was so hilarious; whereas SNL is in kind of a slump right now. It makes me hate Lorne Michaels’ policy of no improve on SNL even more. Anyway, I can’t stress enough how hilarious it was. After that we walked around a bit, stopped at a street vendor for some hot dogs, and went back to the hotel.

When we woke up on Monday, we headed out towards the American Museum of Natural History. At this point, the subways were still working so we made good use of them. On the way, we were on the phone trying to secure our theater tickets for that night. Arrangements had been made, tickets confirmed, and everything looked good. They said they would call us if they had any problems. After the subway ride, everybody was feeling a little hungry (especially me). Luckily you can’t go anywhere in New York without seeing a hot dog vendor. The American Museum of Natural History is no different. I got two polish sausages, and man, were they good.

We stayed at the museum a long time, and though I really enjoyed the dinosaur and the evolution exhibits (especially the way the evolution exhibit had a video explaining how non-scientific intelligent design is), what I was really looking forward to was visiting the Hayden Planetarium. The director of the planetarium, Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-wrote Origins: 14 Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution which I had read and really enjoyed. But, I was disappointed with the show that we got tickets for because they only used the real planetarium star-projector once, for about 30 seconds. After that it was all video projected up onto the ceiling. It was narrated by Harrison Ford, so of course the writers deemed it necessary to throw all manner of Star Wars references into the script. I still enjoyed it, but like I said I was disappointed. They had another show, and it was probably much better. After the planetarium show they had a neat exhibit where you walk around the giant planetarium sphere, and it talks about the sizes of different things and increases by factors of 10. So you go from the giant sphere being the size of a proton to the giant sphere being the size of an apple, the Earth, Jupiter, the Sun, the Galaxy, the local group, etc. They also had a long walk where you start at the beginning of time and they show you where along that time line a bunch of things, happened. Such as the universe becoming transparent, the first stars forming, the earth forming, and then at the very end all of human history took place in less than the width of a hair. That was also very good. After the planetarium we saw THE most boring IMAX movie ever, walked around for a while and – our primal thirst for Natural History sated– left.

From the museum, we went to the box office to pick up our theater tickets. We stood in line for a while, and when we got to the front we were looking at a thin, short man with gray hair and a pleasant look on his face. He told us that the tickets we were supposed to have weren’t in the system (though nobody had called us to tell us there was a problem with our tickets), but that he had some seats available on the side near the front. Our cheap seats were right next to the $100+ seats. The show (at this point I only knew it was called “Sweeney Todd”) was one that I had never heard of before, and honestly when I heard that the show was about a murderous barber, I wasn’t much looking forward to it. The last time we were in New York we saw Chicago, and that was before the movie came out and it got all popular. Anyway, I was couldn’t have been more wrong about “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”. It was excellent. There was no traditional orchestra- all of the actors played an instrument, and they never left the stage- when they weren’t in the middle of the scene they would be off to the side, instrument in hand. We all agreed the show was great.

After the show let out, we walked around town and, on my aunt’s suggestion, checked out her old neighborhood, which is right off Times Square. She had told me before we left that that was where a lot of people our age hung out. So, we looked around and ended up finding a bar there called Scruffy Duffy’s. At first I think we all meant to have only a few beers, but as soon as I suggested to Andrew that we do a shot of tequila, we figured that, what the hell, we were in New York. We proceeded to have a good time; all the while the news was telling us that all hope of having subway access the next day had disappeared. We wanted to do car bombs, but they were like $10 each and so we skipped on those… until later, when Roshan bought them (not only for us, but for a girl we were talking to, too). Our bartender was really great- he served us first, and even gave us his opinions of the other bars around. That night was probably the biggest single expense that we had in New York, but it was worth it.

When we got going the next day – around 3:00pm, as I recall – we didn’t have much planned. So we went down to Fifth Avenue and looked at all of the stores and their Christmas decorations. We stopped in Tiffany’s to see what it was like, and I can tell you now that there was nothing in that store that I could afford. We looked at Christmas ornaments, and they cost $115. “They cost a lot because they’re from Tiffany’s, so they’re special” the lady told us. At first I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. I got yelled at for taking a picture of my friend inside of the Louis Vuitton store. I was informed by Marc that high-end stores don’t like you taking pictures in them. Okay, fine. So when we went to a different store, which was not nearly as high-end and I didn’t think they’d mind I took another picture. They did mind. I think it’s a stupid idea not to let people take pictures in your stores. Honestly, if someone is going to copy your design don’t you think they’d buy one, take it apart, and look at it? I guess not. Anyway, we did that, I stopped by the Nintendo store where all they had on display was a bunch of DS games, we stopped by the Sony store and saw a digital camera about the size of a pack of gum (but the pictures weren’t all that great), Matt Ball took the cover off of Sony’s high-end CD player and the lady there kindly told him he wasn’t supposed to do that- you were supposed to push a button and have the cover slide over, and we window shopped at a few other stores.

I got separated from the others and went to spend my time in Rockefeller Center by the big tree, where I donated some money to charity and in return got a free hat and nice conversation with the guy taking donations about college football. Around dinner time the rest of our group found a TGI Friday’s and thought it sounded good. They called me and told me to meet them there. As I was walking trying to find the Friday’s that they were at (I originally went to a different one a few blocks away), they called me and told me that soon after they were seated, they got up and left. When asked about the reason, we agreed that $16 was too much for a hamburger- even in NYC. So, we met up and walked around looking for a different restaurant.

Along the way I noticed a restaurant with the name PJ Moran’s. It caught my eye because there is a funny picture making the rounds online, particularly on Fark.com, of a protester holding up a sign that reads something like “Get a Brain! Morans!” meaning to say, of course, “Morons”. Anyway, as I walked over to check out the menu (most restaurants in NYC have a menu posted outside the door), a man and his party walked out of the restaurant claiming that they served the best steak he’d ever had, both times that he’d been there. Sounded interesting, and the prices, while still above Columbus prices, were not nearly as inflated as $16/hamburger. So we ate there. I had a Gaelic Steak with some sort of awesome sauce, and it was delicious. We stayed there for quite a while, and made good use of their wine list. After dining at Moran’s, we headed back to the hotel for some Euchre and reading.

The next morning we woke up and checked out of the hotel. After making sure they were able to hold our bags for us, we headed south towards Greenwich Village and Chinatown. I stopped around 29th street to give my aunt a call and see if she wanted to meet for lunch. She explained that she really couldn’t go anywhere, since the subways weren’t running. In the end, we decided that 181st street was simply too far of a walk from 29th street. By the time I was done with my phone call, my friends had of course left me and were far ahead and refused to wait for me to catch up. So, after many phone calls, several blocks, and a bit of jogging, I caught up to them just in time for lunch.

After walking through Chinatown for a while, we came across Lombardi’s Pizza, which was apparently “America’s First Licensed Pizza Restaurant”. In the 20’s they had no seating and it was simply carryout from a small building, or “Pizza Hut”. I just thought of that joke now. Anyway, it was a cash only place, and there were no free refills on the soft drinks. It was a combination of these things and the large framed picture of Al Capone with a heart around him and a plaque underneath reading “Founder/CEO/CFO/COO/Da Boss” that led me to quip that it may be a front for the mob. Long story short, it wasn’t, and the story as to why I no longer have thumbs is completely unrelated. Just kidding- there was no picture of Capone, just a little statue of him and a plaque that said something like “Just give me the pizza and nobody gets hurt”. Although I still believe my mob theory has merit, since I asked the bartender’s opinion of James Gandolfini and he responded “He’s alright, I guess”. Okay, so that’s a lie too- but the little statue was really there. Moving on; the pizza was okay, the toppings were good but the sauce wasn’t as good as I had hoped it would be. On the plus side, I ordered a small pizza and when it came out it was almost as big as the larges the others were splitting.

After lunch it was getting to be late afternoon and we headed back to the hotel to pick up our bags. Happily, the bags were all there and we loaded ourselves up like pack mules (except Marc, who was only too happy to remind us every chance he got that he was able to pack his entire wardrobe, as well as his queen-size mattress, kitchen sink, and several small animals into his back pack) for the hike to the bus station. We found out later that we had walked over 10 miles that day.

At the bus station, we bought our tickets, and waited in line to get on the bus. Our tickets were torn, and when we got outside we waited beside the bus for the driver to open the luggage compartment below. Marc, with his backpack clutched proudly in his arms like it was a golden egg, boarded the bus. This presented a problem, however, for apparently knowing how to count in the double-digits isn’t a requirement for a New York bus driver’s license. Our would-be driver ripped too many tickets, and since we had to wait beside the bus we weren’t able to get on. So all of us, except for Marc, had to wait for the next bus. I like to imagine that, when we called Marc to tell him we would be on a different bus, he started crying a little, threw up his arms in anger and yelled “Damn me and my impeccable packing skill!!” But he probably didn’t. After we got off the bus we were picked up by Roshan’s Aunt, who took us back to her house and fed us noodles for the trip home. Because as she reminded us, it’s important to get a good dose of carbs before sitting in a car for 8 hours. She didn’t really say that- we really appreciated their whole family’s generous hospitality.

On the way home, we linked Andrew’s and my laptops together in an ICN, or Intra-Car-Network and watched GATTACA. Which, for those of you playing the home game is Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Thymine, Adenine, Cytosine, Adenine or the entirety of Jude Law’s genetic code. We made it home to Columbus at around 5:30 in the morning, which apparently was about the time of day that I like to get into an argument with Marc for no reason whatsoever about how early I had to be at work the next morning, and then go to sleep only to go into work late.

Joke
If you’re still reading, congratulations! You have passed the reading requirement section of the Virginia SOL High School Graduation test.