The Sweetest Day

18. October 2008 by Jenn.

October 18, Gramercy Park, NYC 

Things I’ve learned today: 

*Not much of a view: Dreaming about your ex-boyfriend just before you wake up is a melancholy way to start the day, made more so when you look through the window of your hotel room a minute later and see what looks like a charcoal drawing on the other side. Luckily, getting closer I found a sunny sky peeking through the slit between the two buildings out there. This was lucky not in the interest of cheering me up about a relationship, but because running around Manhattan in the rain is not what I planned for this birthday trip - and I have a blow out.

*At least a few scientists, social scientists, or scholarly types (it’s not clear what the credentials are) have espoused the view that “oriental” and “primitive” women  have “rearward” vulvas. The room I’m staying in at an artist-painted hotel has paintings on the walls of Chinese lovers - sort of ancients in rural settings without the rural settings . The slight haha factor of the room makes you come up with names for it (Ancient Chinese Secret, Chinese Laundry Room). One drawing is done as a poster of a journal or text book page, with a couple in a curious position and the scholarly, if erroneous, description/info about backward women underneath. Hot damn! 

*A chocolate, glazed donut at Dunkin Donuts has 34o calories, something I discovered when I went in to pick up a coffee with milk and sugar for Diego, the manager of the hotel, which I’ve stayed in since yesterday.  I was all set to get a donut, and the helpful info helped me decide against it. Do you really need calorie stats for donuts? This reminds me of Starbucks low fat and worthless baked items (except for a couple of full-fat muffins in chocolate and pumpkin): If you need to know how fatty a dessert-type snack is, or you only eat cake when it’s got no fat, choose something fruit or vegetable. If you’re strictly health conscious and obsessed with fat, eat a stalk of celery. There are so many ways to get a nutritional bang for your buck, and none of them involve cake of any sort. And that low-fat pound cake has a scarier list of ingredients than any lovingly made cake containing butter, eggs, and sugar. 

*From the “Gothic: Dark Glamour” and “Arbiters of Style” exhibits at the Fashion Institute of Technology - Virtually all fashion ideas have been done, that’s no surprise - they’re exponentially ripped off now - and that’s not a bad thing, just the way it is. But over the past hundred years, it’s amazing just how much recycling there is - like pop music. There aren’t unlimited great ideas, just unlimited ways of combining them, it seems. 

*From the Museum of Sex (I walked by twice and decided to go in): ** Wolves mating sound like a party in a haunted house; hyenas ramble, chirp, and laugh, well, like hyenas; the female hyena gives birth by “discharging a baby hyena [what else?] from the end of her ‘penis.’” Biologists collect this info, so I guess we have no right thinking animals are weird. Oh, and vasectomies are favored for “neutering” a lion, so to avoid influencing his role in his pride, and male seahorses do get pregnant (I’ve been hearing that for a while now) after females deposit eggs into their stomach pouches. On another floor of the museum, people were treated to celebrity sex tapes, which basically show that if you’re dumb enough to put yourself on tape being sexually intimate and you’re famous, you also tend to engage in curiously unsexy sex. I should go catch the Steinkamp installation, which involves “trippy” wall projections of poisonous flowers, but first I’m going to see if I can persuade Diego to show me/let me see any empty rooms - they’re all painted by artists. Cheers!  

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