This town – or is it this country? – seems obsessed with puns. Whether it is theater taglines like the one in the subject line or names of restaurants all across the city – from A Salt and Battery to the Soy Luck Club. You can see it in newspaper headlines and in billboards everywhere. Lovely.

*

You can find good brews in many place – whether locally brewed beers in places like the Heartland Brewery or simply local/regional beers that are more than palatable. The important thing is to avoid the national brands like Coors and Budweiser or various locals like Rolling Rock. They are the archetypical love-in-a-canoe beer, and simply unpalatable.

*

I want a burrito.

*

There are very few scooters in NYC. It seems strange, since it’s such a logical form of transportation for a big city. Maybe it’s because the public transportation actually works here, something that seems extremely alien to me. Maybe there are high taxes. Whatever it is, I expected many many more of them.

*

A fight nearly broke out on the subway today. A black woman was accosting a man who had apparently spoken rudely to her friend. She talked smack to him with all the niceties and finesse of this urban ritual – the name-calling, the taunting, the incessant repetition and hand-waving-in-front-of-the-guy’s-face. When they got up to start really getting it on you could see half the car moving out to give them space. Might have been fun, but the train driver stopped the train, moved in to intercept and only proceeded to the station once he’d phoned ahead for the cops to be present. We switched to a different train. They were still at it.

*

Tomorrow we buy a car. If everything goes according to plan, it’ll be a ’96 Jeep Cherokee.