coffee.

I love coffee. I drink a lot of it, which could be because I love it or because I never sleep anymore. But I have some issues with NYC coffee that desperately need to be addressed. 

If you're from Missouri, you know that coffee is insanely hot. Like it will burn your mouth and your hands. And your legs when you accidentally spill it all over yourself in the car. But people from NYC are either much more tough than us Missouri-folk or else they don't realize that they're getting 3rd degree burns, because no one gives you cup koozies when you order coffee. I really don't understand it! The coffee is so hot I literally cannot touch the cup without fear of injury, but people just walk around drinking their coffee like it's no big deal. No, a napkin is not the same as a cup koozie. They're too slippery and don't provide a good grip and sometimes make me drop my coffee right outside the subway entrance. To make things worse, when I was telling my coworker, Miriam, about my koozie issues, she just laughed and told me that koozie is not a word. Apparently, people in NYC call it a "cozy" or a "sleeve."  Maybe that's why people never give me koozies; because they don't know what word I'm saying or what I'm talking about. 

Look what I just found when I Googled "koozy." A Ben & Jerry's ice cream koozy! I need this.

So, instead of giving me a koozie, they put my coffee in a bag. Yeah, a paper bag. I'm confused. Maybe it makes for easier transportation, but I don't like it. I guess they use special paper bags, because they have a little cardboard square at the bottom to keep the coffee flat, but that still doesn't answer my confusion about why they put my coffee in a bag. Which leads me to the issue of the terrible lids. Sure, maybe putting coffee in a bag is a good idea if the coffee lids don't spill, but they do.  And then the bag gets wet and threatens ripping and spilling it's contents all over the hallway at work. Everyone uses those flimsy flat lids that you have to basically rip a hole in to drink out of and then they never re-close.

It is also really intimidating to order coffee in NYC. It could be because there are always thousands of people in line behind you and the cashiers are always rushing you so that they can get all the thousands of customers in and out, but it's scary.  We just got a Dunkin' Donuts in my building at work and I went there with some of my students and it was terrifying. Everyone from the East coast already knows exactly what they like from Dunkin' Donuts, so I was just standing there wide-eyed and confused until I finally just said something intelligent like, "Coffee. How do I do that?" Then, I have to always remember to tell them that I want my coffee black, and then they look at me like I'm crazy because everyone here likes their coffee with tons of sugar and whole milk. Ew. I always thought whole milk was just for children. Learn something new every day.

best friend weekend.

This weekend was best friend weekend. What? You didn't know that? That means your best friends didn't fly across the country to see you and have the greatest times of your lives. That's too bad, because my best friends did. 

My best friends are named Abby and Andrea and we just dominated this city. And here is how we did it, in no particular order. On Friday, I heard the doorbell and ran down the hall screaming, in a normal way, not in a psycho way. Then, since we've all been dieting in preparation for this weekend, we decided to go shove food in our face pretty much continually for 4 days. Burgers, the most amazing Thai food in the world, omelets, french toast, pizza, pickles, brats, fries, ribs, sauerkraut, popcorn, and obviously, an unhealthy number of bagels. It was basically Girls vs. Food. Our diet starts tomorrow.

Our diet starts tomorrow.

We did other things besides eat, too. We took the subway into Manhattan, got lost, grabbed a cab and then went down to the 9/11 memorial. Though we couldn't get tickets to see the pool, there is something amazing about being with hundreds of people in one area for one reason. And it can all be wrapped up in the old woman who was walking in front of us wearing an American flag hat and thanking the police for all they do.


We hit up Central Park, watched some people play soccer, ate more bagels, and went shopping at H&M, the store that seems amazing but always ends up being terrible because they never have enough people working the check-out. We also went dancing at Gleason's, which we have now renamed Bones2 (if you are from Jeff City, you will understand that, because it was just that classy). Then I fell on the ground and sprained my ankle because my chair fell off a step and we watched our friend Aubrey and 8 other guys dance and sing naked on a stage. Then we went to a bar and hung out with the cast and became best friends with the bartender who was wearing a candy necklace and the transvestite with amazing legs and hot pink lipstick who was singing karaoke. And then Aubrey took us to a bar where he used to work and we created our own dance floor. Because that's what we do.

Then it was Sunday. So we walked to the beer garden in our neighborhood and made friends with the Czech waitress who decided to teach us profanities in her language while Andrea tried to convince us to be friends with some vampires and instead opted for befriending some normal people, which was definitely a better decision. So we took a cab ride with the greatest cabbie ever to my roomie's and my favorite pub and played darts and made friends with the only other Cardinals fan in the bar.  We also spent some time staring out my back window and watching the crazy cat lady with the tin foil windows feed the cats that live in our backyard, which is actually just a concrete slab with two tiki torches.

See those windows that are kind of shiny? That's aluminum foil. That's where the cat lady peeks out and whistles for the cats. That's where she lives.

Abby and Andrea are my BFF's and that means best friends forever.

eight and counting.

Our cockroach total has increased, and I'm not happy about it. Last night was generally terrible for me. I went to bed at 11pm and then laid there not asleep for approximately seven hours. At one point I got up to go to the bathroom and drink some tea in hopes that it would make me tired, but as I walked into the bathroom and flicked on the light, five cockroaches started running underneath the bathtub. Some of them were little and some of them were not little and were extremely fast and terrifying. This is worse than that time I lived with my grandparents and a mouse ran across my foot in the basement bathroom. At least mice are cute.


Apparently, everyone has cockroaches up here and we're supposed to buy this magical little container with cockroach poison that kills them. I don't like this. This is not normal.

It looks like this. Maybe it even makes the roaches glow like in the picture.

I was just becoming comfortable in destroying the Missouri spiders that used to live in our apartment (but only because I had to. My old roomie, Danielle, was even more terrified of spiders. We kept spider spray at our front door so that we could attack any bug that dared enter our premises). Actually, I think I might be lying and I think I'm actually still terrified of spiders. Once I saw a spider the size of a baseball in my driveway. No, I'm not exaggerating. It was monstrous and I could tell it wanted to attack me. And I bet it was poisonous. So, yes, I'm still scared of spiders. But I'm also scared of cockroaches. Because they scuttle and they're disgusting and Scott says you can hear their little gross cockroach feet when they run across the hardwood floors. What if one touches me? What if they crawl on me while I'm sleeping? What if I have to go to the bathroom at night again?

It was possibly one of the most terrifying things I've experienced in New York City. That and learning about bed bugs. My coworker, Miriam, always tells me these terrifying stories about bed bugs and how they live in all your clothes and your mattress and you can never get rid of them and they come out at night to suck your blood like little vampires and you can get them practically anywhere and how she once saw some crawling on a person in the subway and how they can jump and she could have gotten bed bugs from that person. They look like this:

I found this bed bug picture on the internet. That means it's real.

So here's hoping that I never get bed bugs and that I can sleep all the way through the night so that I don't have to risk entering the cockroach bathroom. I really don't like this.