On Sunday, it was our goal to get up early and spend the entire day at the MET Museum of Art. Dani was contemplating on joining us, but then decided that sleeping in was a much better strategy for the day. From 10am-3 we planned on strolling the exhibits. Then we were to leave for a hip-hop/stomp concert in Rumsey Playfield. On the walk from the 6-train to the museum, my sister realized her need to find a bathroom. We needed breakfast anyways, so we decided to stop in a place, buy something, and use their restroom. The problem with this idea was that hardly any of the convenience stores/cafes had bathrooms for customer use.
We wandered and rambled with no success. This made us think back to a funny commercial that previewed before an outdoor movie the other night in Bryant Park. The commercial was an ad for hand sanitizer and featured a cookie-monster-like puppet as the main character. A joke was made about everyone in the audience needing to use hand sanitizer because, in fact, we were probably sitting where a bum had previously peed. There were at leave two thousand members there to view the summertime outdoor movie special. You really had to be there to see the humor, but everyone in the crowd suddenly lifted their hands off the ground and roared with laughter.
I had often wondered where the homeless people go to use the bathroom. I’d assume that they find dark ally-ways, dumpsters, or even bushes in the park, but I never thought the day would come that I’d see the following horrific sight. On my walk to work out in Long Island City the other day, I kid you not; I saw a human turd settled in the middle of the sidewalk. Though I obviously didn’t stop to examine the thing, I knew it could only be human by the unsettling pair of whitey-tighties on the ground in the very vicinity. I could not believe my eyes, yet it was so believable.
The image is still fresh in my mind, though it’s been over a week since I beheld this grotesque sight. You will see many wonderful things while in New York, but you will also witness some rarities that you will wish you never had the misfortune of seeing. That’s enough of the potty talk. Moving on to breakfast—weird transition—I know. We found a little bakery near the MET and got too many goodies to finish. We took some to go, but they wouldn’t let us take them into the museum with us. Walking back outside, we crammed most of the expensive pastries into our mouths, but we were so full that we ended up throwing some away.
We bought our tickets for full price, though any sort of donation was accepted. I would have felt so guilty telling the clerk that we wanted to pay a dollar each or, even worse, a penny like most of the NYU girls I met did. I have such a demanding conscious. At first, I was reading many of the plaques under the artworks, but upon realizing I wasn’t retaining any of the information, I drifted along quickly without continuing reading. We spent an entire 6 hours on the bottom floor and didn’t even get to the Egyptian display. I started getting a little antsy, and my sister’s feet were tired. The Punk Fashion Exhibit was the last we viewed that day. Besides the Interior Design expositions, the fashion exhibit was by far the coolest. Punk isn’t really my style, but as a designer, one must learn to appreciate all forms of fashion.
Always,
Alena Netia Horowitz
