I miss New York. Chicago is small and I bought in to the idea that a city is only a city if you get lost every time you go in it. I guess I better start getting lost in Chicago again and remind myself that it's not just Belmont, Southport and Uptown. Speaking of which...

John and I celebrated our first anniversary together on Sunday evening. Much to my surprise, he had arranged for us to sneak illegally into the abandoned Uptown Theater and spend a couple hours exploring it. If you're unaware of John's documentary on the subject (which would mean you have never spoken to him before), then you wouldn't know that the theater is the largest movie palace in the United States, a last decaying remnant of the decadence that was the 1920's.

Though the theater is falling to pieces in some places (a chunk of plaster here, a warped wood-panelled wall there), it maintains an overwhelming beauty that literally takes your breath away. It's hard to believe that architecture in the United States every took on such European, indulgent attention to detail. Where chandeliers no longer illuminate the towering ceilings, the handwork of hundreds of artists hides veiled in cavernous shadows, forgotten.

The most striking thing about being in a place like the Uptown--a place abandoned, forgotten--where thousands of people walk by each day, unaware of what sits inside, is how it simultaneously is ravaged by, and untouched by, time. It decays, yes, but somehow it feels as if you might shut your eyes, reopen them, and find yourself in another time--maybe wearing your best outfit and waiting in the ticket line for a seat to the latest talkie; children running between the brass posts and velvet ropes, soon to be stowed away in the theater's nursery; the mechanics and the electricians downstairs, toiling in the heat by Titanic-sized boilers and fans, unwittingly taking in Legionnaire's air and a stinted life; the women in their Mezzanine boxes, chattering and fanning themselves; the projectionist's assistant struggling up flights upon flights of stairs to deliver the burdening film reel and when he reaches the top, he can stare from the box--ten stories above the rest of the audience, the rest of the world--and watch.

But then you open your eyes and you remember that it's 2007. The theater is abandoned, crumbling under the weight of years of neglect, and life goes on. Who knows what will happen with this amazing place, but I'm glad that I've been inside and seen it with my own eyes. Oh, and Bob, the building manager, said he'd happily sneak anyone else in who wants to go. :)

Arriving back in Lebanon yet again is less exciting and more deja vu each time I am on break. This time, the dullness of my hometown is compounded by the total awesomeness (and lack of a close-by replacement) of New York.

I'm afraid that I'm destined to be THAT girl who's like: "Oh my God! Well you think THAT sandwich is good?? AT SIXTH AND TWELFTH IN MANHATTAN I ONCE HAD THIS SANDWICH THAT RIVALED GOD." yackyackyackyack.... It's like when I came back from studying abroad in the south of France and everything was about the Mediterranean and apricots, except this time it's all about the East River and pizza. And oh-mi-god-lemme-tellya-bout-the-pizza-!!

-pepperoni-like-you-wouldn't-believe-sister-!!.

And let's face it: I really hated New York for the first month or so I was there. HATED IT.

The crowds. The smells. The subway stabbings. The drug dealing elderly women on my stoop. The cooped-up feeling of a boyfriend-shared, one-bedroom apartment. The yelling on your corner at 2 am. The elbowing for room on Sixth Avenue. The Staten Island accent. Did I mention the crowds?

I once spent the entirety of forty blocks underground on an express train that was crawling more slowly than the local tracks with my nose pressed into one man's armpit and my ass pressed into another man's palm.

I hated New York.

But like every other sucker who moves to the city, I fell for it. After the sun goes down and the sidewalks radiate heat from the day, a breeze blows in from the Atlantic and it's hard not to love it. By dusk, the city rushes quietly home--by bus, by car--and the din of clinking flatware against white porcelain plates plays like distant hands on ivory keys in Carnegie. Walking along 82nd, the squeaking friction between a wine glass and the terry cloth drying it is louder than your footsteps while the old man holding both these items stares at you through his thick glasses from his fourth floor apartment and you think that it's nice he doesn't live any higher than the fourth floor if he absolutely must live in a ritzy apartment on the Upper West Side and that you have maybe seen him on the subway with a camel-colored briefcase and you know there's only the one wine glass and that he has dined alone.

When the weather cools down, the leaves change color--setting the city afire in oranges and golds. And you love that even after months of becoming a jaded New Yorker, the sight of the Chrysler Building's triangulated, impossible tip first buzzing and then bursting into light like an inverted firecracker against a dark canvas sky still takes your breath away.

There's a lot wrong with New York, but the real problem is that there's too many things right with it. You can't always love it, but you can't leave it either. If you do, you can hear the chk-chk, chk-chk of the subway, the clacking of stilettos against pavement, the honking of taxis and the fizzing, crackling electricity of the city as it turns on its lights. It's too much to bear and you know you'll be back.

A Christmas Struggle

When I was barely leaving toddler-dom, I asked my mom every night for over a year to read me 'Twas the Night Before Christmas before bed.

The copy of the book I had seemed old to me, which made it special. Its cover was hard and big--I couldn't cover it with both my hands spread on its surface. Like most kids, the idea of this man who lived forever and just made presents all year consumed me. It made sense that he existed. Who wouldn't love just giving gifts for a living and having an army of elves and cavalary of reindeer at your disposal? But how was Santa the one who got the gig? Had nobody been giving gifts before then? Did Santa start Christmas? No, the baby Jesus did. I had that book, too. Even at this young of an age, the basic commercial and spiritual clash of Christmas was baffling me.

'That's tacky,' my mom said when the apartment across the street from our house put up a 'Happy X-Mas' light-up sign. I asked why and she explained that the 'X' took all the nice things out of Christmas--that it made Christmas all about buying stuff and not about being with family and friends. 'Why bother putting up the sign if it doesn't even spell the whole word out? It's missing the real message.'

So I would return to my studies, poring over the famous Christmas Eve text, looking for clues. After my mom shut the door, I'd pick the book back up from its spot on my bookshelf and, unable to read all the words, stare at the pictures. There had to be something I was missing, and once I found it, the whole Santa-Jesus-Christmas thing would become clear to me. Instead, the pictures--out of the context of the story itself--became more confusing.

Most confusing was the last picture in the book. Santa had finished his big night--the gifts delivered, the cookies eaten, the milk drank. But here on the last page, without any words to explain, was Santa--lying out in the sun, stretched onto a beach chair with sunscreen slathered thick and white on his nose. He was holding a drink with a little umbrella in it like the ones that I could get at TGIFriday's with my soda if I asked the waiter nicely. He was on vacation.


A slew of questions arose: Did he stop at home or did he leave the reindeer on their own to get back to the Pole? Where's his suit and does he always wear yellow swim trunks when not in his suit? Where's Mrs. Claus? Does she get a vacation, or do she and the elves slave over the next year's toys beginning on December 26th without any help from Santa? When does his vacation end, does it last a week or until December 23rd of the next year?

After a year, I got tired of trying to figure it out. I had learned to read almost all of the words in the book, I had stared at the pictures for hours on end, and nothing was becoming more clear. Santa, I guessed, would remain a mystery.

Perhaps driving this Christmas quest was my personal relationship with Jesus. I don't mean this in any spiritual sense. I really mean 'relationship,' to the point where I almost had a crush on the Biblical figure at the age of four. Of all my imaginary playmates (Charlaines my five-dollar pink bear bought at KB Toys, Barbie, Grover from Sesame Street, Elmo too--until I found out he was a 'he' and not a 'she'), Jesus was my favorite. He was the most real and the nicest.

My friendship with Jesus came crashing down around me my last year in preschool. On a sticky August afternoon, Jesus and I were playing outside under my favorite tree in my backyard. My dad had made a swing for me in the tree--a totally, utterly rough tree swing with rope that would give even the toughest sailors callouses and a flat, hard, butt-numbing board for a seat. I loved it. So on this afternoon, I--willing to share--was pushing Jesus on the swing since it was his turn. Then, something happened. It might have been because I hadn't been really spending as much time as I once had looking at the illustrations in my Mom's childhood Bible, or maybe because I had waited so long before I did share the swing with Him, or maybe I was just pushing too hard. But suddenly, unexpected, Jesus flew back much farther than expected and I was hit in the face.

I fell onto my back, knocking my head on the ground. Worst of all was my chin--scraped by either His foot or the butt-numbing swing itself. I ran inside, crying and confused. While I sat in her lap, my mom put Neosporin, gauze and medical tape on my chin and I explained to her what had happened. Through my tears, I made a vow. I was done playing with Jesus.

I went back to studying my 'Twas text. It wasn't that I didn't believe in Jesus, I concluded, I just wasn't friends with Him anymore. Sadly, Santa still wasn't providing any more answers as he smiled over his tropical drink. Even more devastating was when, clued in by context, I found out that Santa was not real.

The details of this horrible revelation I do not remember. According to my mom, I asked for the truth in the car while on a errand drive with her. I asked timidly and in a way that my Mom took to mean that I had figured it out, and even if she couldn't pull over on Ohio Route 42 to talk about it, she should be honest with me then and there. After she said that I was right, Santa didn't exist, she tried to explain the spirit of Santa Claus while I cried. I've done a pretty great job totally repressing this memory. I do remember, however, putting the book on the shelf indefinitely, deciding I was too old for Santa, and feeling more confused than ever about what Christmas meant.

Things have changed in the last eighteen years. I no longer resent Santa for not being real and I'm not grudging on Jesus anymore for that scrape he gave me on the swing. I don't keep a copy of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas nor of The Holy Bible bedside anymore. I don't believe in Santa, and I'm pretty sure Jesus was an okay guy but not the son of God or anything.

Some children in France--as well as some other Catholic countries--are taught that Santa was actually St. Nicholas, patron saint of children, sailors and pawnbrokers (go figure). On a cold night, three lost children are taken into the cottage of a butcher who feeds them heavily and then chops them into bits and pieces, tossing their sliced and now salted remains into a barrel for later. Seven years pass and St. Nicholas happens along the cottage, pieces the kids back together and informs the butcher he can repent for his sins and, well, God will set him free. In other versions of the story, he grabs the butcher by the heels and shoves him in the barrel for eternity, putting a new spin on children's images of Hell.

I'm not sure at which point Nicholas went from being Saint to being Santa and moved from France to the North Pole, but I'm okay with this story. Granted, it's bloody and dated (from the 1500s actually), but in it, Santa and God coexist in an epic battle of good versus evil. So I may not be sure how commercially and/or spiritually I want to spend my Christmas this year--the ratio of my time spent mall shopping and praying now escapes me--but either way, they both beat the third alternative--spending seven years salty and pieces at the bottom of a barrel. And I suppose that's a good reason to celebrate.

I'm not feeling particularly creative or witty in the last few days. This could be for a number of reasons:

1.) I took the LSAT on Saturday and am still slowly returning to the state of a normally-functioning human being. More on that later.
2.) This is my last week at work, and I'm depleted. Yoga is just wearing me down right now, and we all know that's not what is supposed to happen.
3.) It's cold.
4.) I don't have any sweet-looking outfits that put sass in my... well... writing.

In case you're just joining us, I've been in New York for six months now. Correction: Six months as of Saturday. I arrived to Harlem, New York on Saturday, June 10, 2006 where I spent the next three months working at TOH at T. I then moved at the end of August to Brooklyn where I have lived for the next three months and worked at YL at R. I will leave very close to exactly six months later, on Tuesday, December 12th--two days after my 22nd birthday.

While I very much hated this city for the first month or so, I've learned that I love it. My time in New York has been less of just a job stint in the city and more of a study abroad experience. This may be a little saccharine and expected, but I really do think I've matured a lot in my time here. I've discovered a lot about what I love about writing, what I hate about magazines, and who I am in general. I've also become something of a New Yorker--albeit, a New Yorker who loves Chicago more...maybe.

Strangely enough, as much about New York still remains a mystery to me (Alphabet City, Williamsburg, Queens...), I still feel like I know more about NYC than I do about Chicago. And I also hate to admit it, but I have grown to love the interconnected incestuousness of New York, complemented by all of its social circle websites that list where the latest art gallery openings and open bars are. I'm still on newsletter mailings for Chicago stuff, but when I receive the Trib's Metromix in my inbox, I roll my eyes because it's yet another week of "Best Bartender" or "Your Pics," and not the everchanging social scene of New York.

Now, I'm not complaining about my social life in Chicago versus my social life in New York (okay, maybe a little), but the vastness of New York eventually got to me. Granted, it took moving to the baby-infested borough of Brooklyn to do that. (Goddamn, I just love their rosy little faces.)

However, I've just come to realize that maybe I won't just be a Chicago bum all my life, moving from the Andersonville/Southport to Near North/Lincoln Park to the 'burbs, as I've always thought would happen. Maybe other things lie before me. And I guess that's pretty cool.

From Brian Doyle's The Wet Engine, to be published next year.

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird's heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird's heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird's heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladores, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them, and the white men had never seen such creatures, for hummingbirds came into the world only in the Americas, nowhere else in the universe, more than three hundred species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring in hummer time zones nine times removed from ours, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backwards. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today, this very day, in the Americas: bearded helmetcrests and booted racket-tails, violet-tailed sylphs and violet-capped woodnymphs, crimson topazes and purple-crowned fairies, red-tailed comets and amethyst woodstars, rainbow-bearded thornbills and glittering-bellied emeralds, velvet-purple coronets and golden-bellied star-frontlets, fiery-tailed awlbills and Andean hillstars, spatuletails and pufflegs, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant's fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Hummingbirds, like all flying birds but more so, have incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms. To drive those metabolisms they have race-car hearts that eat oxygen at an eye-popping rate. Their hearts are built of thinner, leaner fibers than ours. Their arteries are stiffer and more taut. They have more mitochondria in their heart muscles -- anything to gulp more oxygen. Their hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creature. It's expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine. Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime. You can spend them slowly, like a tortoise, and live to be two hundred years old, or you can spend them fast, like a hummingbird, and live to be two years old.

The biggest heart in the world is inside the blue whale. It weighs more than seven tons. It's as big as a room. It is a room, with four chambers. A child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves. The valves are as big as the swinging doors in a saloon. This house of a heart drives a creature a hundred feet long. When this creature is born it is twenty feet long and weighs four tons. It is waaaaay bigger than your car. It drinks a hundred gallons of milk from its mama every day and gains two hundred pounds a day and when it is seven or eight years old it endures an unimaginable puberty and then it essentially disappears from human ken, for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs, and arts of the blue whale. There are perhaps ten thousand blue whales in the world, living in every ocean on earth, and of the largest mammal who ever lived we know nearly nothing. But we know this: the animals with the largest hearts in the world generally travel in pairs, and their penetrating moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue, can be heard underwater for miles and miles.

Mammals and birds have hearts with four chambers. Reptiles and turtles have hearts with three chambers. Fish have hearts with two chambers. Insects and mollusks have hearts with one chamber. Worms have hearts with one chamber, although they may have as many as eleven single-chambered hearts. Unicellular bacteria have no hearts at all; but even they have fluid eternally in motion, washing from one side of the cell to the other, swirling and whirling. No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside.

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

My favorite thing about working at a company like R. is the absolutely-positively-necessary pretense of being one of those healthily-anorexic (I eat a meal a day!), caffeine-free, vegan-only, marathon-running do-gooders. For the first two weeks I worked here, I skipped lunch because no one left their desks between noon and two o'clock to eat anything. Were the Sunchips in the kitchen really enough? I wondered. It turns out they were (if you had like four bags a day), but then at week 3, I retaliated and started frequenting my beloved 39th Street Au Bon Pain again. God love those chocolate-covered macaroons.

As if the bare-bones organic kitchen were not a fun place already, it only gets better when visiting advertisers meet with the publishing staff. Platters of lunches briefly grace the soy-laden fridge--delicious cheese and (red!) meat-filled lunches, succulent chocolate-covered strawberry lunches, mouth-watering cookie and fudge-toffee lunches. When the leftovers hit the kitchen counter (and let's face it, nobody's eating at these meetings anyway, so these platters are usually still stacked with mountains cheddar), word spreads quietly and quickly, like mono in high school. Within moments, the goods are gone. Disappointed, emaciated women in skinny, fair-trade jeans wander the halls, knowing that if their cubicles were only a couple yards closer to the kitchen, they too would have had a square of cheese or almond cookie.

I once walked into the R. kitchen to find two women standing awkwardly, looking confused and as if their kitchen had somehow changed in ways incomprehensible to them. That's when I saw it--two twenty-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola. They weren't even Diet! There they were, two veritably, sugarily, 180-calorie proof bottles of the pure stuff, black and bubbly. The women stared.

'Where do you think it came from?' the first one asked.

'I've never seen something like that here before,' responded the second.

The first woman picked one of the bottles up and turned it around, making sure it really was what she thought. Apparently she figured it out because she put it down quickly and stepped away as if it were a caffeinated bomb, ready to go off if you held it for too long.

'Well, that's strange,' she concluded.

I grabbed a cookie and trotted back to my cubicle, realizing half-way back that I had forgotten to grab a fresh bottle of Poland Spring. When I returned to the kitchen, the Cokes were gone, and so were the women.

More embarassing still is when the ad and pub execs don't have the decency to stash the leftovers in a discrete place and instead leave them sitting in an open conference room. (Let me quickly add that these conference rooms are without walls and tout big glass windows on all sides in some bizarre Brady-Bunch's-vision-of-the-future design that I'm sure looked good fifteen years ago.) So, all of us on the outside can clearly see that mound of macademia nuts and fudge on display, just beyond the museum-like glass walls.

And that's how R. reduces grown men and women to children with their noses pressed against the window, mouths watering and hearts breaking. Red-faced, editors young and old quickly shuffle into the empty conference room, grab a cookie and run out with their heads down. Yes, I did see you, and no, I won't tell anyone.

Perhaps R. is just trying to compensate for the unhealthy habits of other publishing companies where the caffeinated dregs of coffee are happily slurped and extra-buttery popcorn happily jumps about in a running microwave while an editor munches on Doritos. After all, these were the companies of men who ordered their 3 o'clock scotch and sodas on Fridays from the beverage cart as it tooled around the offices and whose secretaries ordered lunches were Salisbury steaks and not edamame. Then again, R. isn't the company selling off chunks of their properties so maybe they've got a good thing going. Either way, I'll be the intern hawking the kitchen until the next meeting is done.

New York anger has surpassed all bounds which I once previously thought existed. Granted, I've become quite the angry New Yorker, but I would have never expected what happened to me on Sunday to happen.

After an argument-ridden/stress-filled/LSAT-studying/suck-festing weekend, I (genuinely) looked forward to taking another practice LSAT on Sunday evening to get the weekend over with. Unfortunately, because Kaplan is a bunch of half-asses, their Brooklyn center is in The Middle of Nowhere, Coney Island. Why the hell would anyone put a study center meant for an entire borough at the fucking tip of Brooklyn? I know--because Kaplan, as I may have previously mentioned, is a bunch of half-asses.

That said, I ordered a car at 3:45 PM to arrive on time (and with at least twenty minutes to spare!) before my 4:30 PM test. 4 o'clock rolled around, then 4:05... I started to anxiously watch my one-block street, jumping every time I heard a car coming down the road and then sadly plopping back down in front of the window to wait more. I tried to call the car service (Arecibo Car Service in BK--never, ever use them), but no surprise--their line was busy. This is al ways a bad sign as it means that not only is there someone already ordering a car and on the line, but at least a dozen people are listening to bad elevator music with Spanish lyrics while they wait on hold. Finally, at 4:20 PM, I got someone on the line and griped, 'THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A CAR HERE 25 MINUTES AGO.' 'Yes, one minute,' the same monotone dude who always answers the phone said.

Yeah, about five minutes later a beige van pulls up. At this point, I have five minutes to get to the fucking tip of Brooklyn (a 15 minute car ride at its shortest). I've neglected to mention why this test was so important. Let me tangentially tirade on another topic, Kaplan.

I signed up for this LSAT course, knowing I'd be on my TM, knowing I wouldn't necessarily have a big social life (I was wrong about that), and knowing I want to, at some point in the next five years, apply for law school. Why NOT do it now that I'm working a day job that's only an internship, right?

Unfortunately for me, the problems started right away. I signed up for an eight-week course that was cancelled and had to switch into a six-week class instead. On day one, I realized that my teacher sucked balls. Big time. And she cancelled classes, randomly, and rescheduled them for inconvenient times (like this coming Sunday from 6-10-- I am not going). Then, after ten of thirteen sessions, she decided to quit and didn't offer up an explanation for her sudden departure. Nick, my new teacher, introduced himself and realized quite quickly that our class had become utterly remedial thanks to former teacher, Marion's efforts. We did some crash-course catch-up when Nick taught us, and many of us realized we hadn't even received all of the benefits of Kaplan we're supposed to. For example, practice test scores have yet to be posted. Our finished homework doesn't show online. Marion wouldn't bring back explanations of tests. Then, after one class with Nick, a new kid who looks like he may or may not be seventeen showed up to teach us.

My Kaplan experience has been so terrible that I've decided to take their "Higher Score Guarantee" and take the course again in the winter (praying for a better teacher) and then take the LSAT again after that. In the meantime, I'm doing all I can to catch up to where I should be AND doing all of my homework required to cash in on my "Higher Score Guarantee." Which takes me back to this Sunday afternoon, where I absolutely needed to attend this test in order to get my guarantee and if I did not get there in time for it to be proctored, I would not get to take it, would not get a score for it, and thus, would not be allowed (despite all of Kaplan's failings) to either get a refund or more classes.

So there I am on Sunday afternoon, oscillating between cursing the driver, his company and the traffic under my breath and practicing yoga-meditation techniques to calm myself down. This, I can assure you, is counterproductive. As I begin to feel less worried (I had called Kaplan and they said I'd have until 4:45 to get there to take the test), my driver misses the turn and plunges bumper first into worse traffic. I'm irate and quietly keeping it to myself.

I will not, I vow, pay this guy. And I will never, ever, ever take Arecibo fucking Car Service again.

Another tanget for my Midwest friends out there--if you're not familiar with car services in the greater New York metropolitan area, there are two kinds of car service--the good kind and the bad kind. The good kind usually is expensive and will generally get you to places on time. The bad kind doesn't always get you places on time, but it is cheaper, and I always call the shots with how much I pay them. I do not, for example, ask, 'How much will that be?' I learned this after my first experience where I got charged twice the price for a ride. Since then, I've made Arecibo pay for their erring ways and give the drivers what they get. I tip really well when drivers are 1) Nice, 2) Don't swerve at other cars and/or pedestrians, 3) Don't play Hispanarap super-fucking loud, 4) Don't drive patched-together ghetto vans with stickers all over the windshield to the point where you can't see out of it.

So as we pull up to the Kaplan Center at 4:50, I ask my driver (who had been listening to Ricky Martin the entire.fu.cking. ride) if he has a ten.
'Why?' he asks.
I only have a twenty, I tell him.
'THIS,' he says, 'is a FIFTEEN dollar ride, MISS.'
Yeah, I say, and I am MORE than TWENTY minutes late because you and your company didn't get me here on time.
'I,' he says, 'am ONLY a driver.' (Here, I see his point, but all these drivers have two things in common: 1) They suck, 2) They work for the same company. So, no deal.)
And? I ask him, You are the driver and you also got lost and you're making me more late for something I don't have time to miss.
'It's fifteen dollars and I'm just a driver, MISS,' he repeats snottily.
Well, I can give you ten or I can get out of the car and never use your service again, I say. (Now, in the moment, I knew haggling for five dollars is not a huge deal, but was more concerned about getting to my test than anything and was not willing to give up even a buck to someone who had made me more than a half hour late.)
'NO,' he said, picking up his little radio as if he's going to tattle on me to HQ.
Well, I'm never calling your service again, I say and move to open the sliding van door.

As I start to step out of the van, Mr. Crazy-Ricky-Martin-Lovin'-Motherfucker starts TO DRIVE THE VAN!!

Here I am--half-out the van and it's moving! Cars honk and he swerves me toward the next parked car. I hop out and as the momentum of the stopping van thrusts forward, the van door SLIDES SHUT ON MY ARM.

'Are you crazy, MISS?' he yells at me.
Am I crazy!? I half-gasp back. YOU just drove with me OUT OF THE CAR.

At this point, I settled on the idea of either reporting him or suing his ass and threw him the twenty and yelled, GIVE ME FIVE AND EXPECT TO BE REPORTED. I HOPE THAT'S WORTH FIVE DOLLARS TO YOU!

I ran into the Kaplan test, where I took my test (I was late), totally frazzled, and shook out of anger the entire three and a half hours. (As a side note as to Kaplan's terrible standards, the proctor had decided to administer both the LSAT and SAT at the same time, so time calls were given sporadically and incorrectly through most of the night. She also refused to call times in terms of minutes for the LSAT's final section. Instead, she called it the New York Marathon and named where we were 'You're in Fort Greene now!' 'OK, everybody, you're approaching Central Park! This is it!!' Does she realize the marathon happened weeks ago and nobody knows the direct proportion for minutes to New York locations??)

---

When I related this story to my mom, she said it's not worth haggling and "engaging with strangers." Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that's just how New York works. I love my mom, but Duluth, Minnesota and hell, even Chicago, pales in comparison to the seething, dirty anger of New Yorkers. I saw a middle-aged woman claw a teenager in the face just the other day in Grand Central as the teenager pulled the woman's hair. Somehow, as I passed the two women, I figured the middle-aged woman was justified in her anger even if not her actions. The teenager looked like a touristy yip-yap type that says 'crunchy' and likes Ricky Martin. She maybe even drives a beige van for Arecibo Car Service.