birthday partying in New York

I remember now why I was always so tired, that summer when I worked in New York.

I was able to arrange my schedule this week so I'd be in New York for my high school friend's birthday, which was awesome because we hadn't hung out for more than a couple of hours since college, which (sadly) was a very long time ago. I arrived from Chicago after 10pm on Wednesday, but my friend was still at dinner, so I had to call her and get her to talk to the doorman into giving me her spare key. I'd been lounging on her futon watching the game (Pistons vs. Magic) for about twenty minutes when she showed up. Apparently the party had started without me, because both she and her other friend were still pretty happy, having just come from a sushi bar serving good sake.

Anyway, we ended up staying up until 1am or so, watching reruns of Gilmore Girls and chatting about tons of random stuff: her hot gay roommate and his relationship with his fragile "of-course-I-can-turn-him-straight" ex-girlfriend (and how growing up in the Bay Area teaches you that gay men stay gay), why educated women our age hate Hillary, all of the potentially underage men she danced with in Jamaica (I anticipate my own Jamaica trip later this year will be much less eventful than hers apparently was), and what happened to all those people we mostly hated in high school.

The next morning, I was conveniently able to walk from her apartment to our new and gorgeous New York office in Chelsea. My friend took the day off (it being her actual birthday) and came to visit me for lunch, and then went off to some spa appointments before meeting me for dinner. We ate at Bouley, where the food was amazingly delicious, and they served us about five desserts, most of which were free (I told them it was her birthday). (More about the food in a later post.) We were so stuffed that we ended up walking back the entire way from Tribeca to Chelsea, trying to work off the food. We met up there with lots more people who were gathering in her apartment. After a couple of glasses of white, we cabbed it to Cain, where we ended up having to pay a $20 cover charge for a lame open bar which only served vodka...no rum, no tequila. We had a pretty good time anyway, but by 2am it was getting really crowded; I was pretty pissed when someone ran into me and made me drop my champagne. Soon afterwards we decided to head over to Tillman's, which was much more chill and more importantly was about a block from home. At some point we decided we were hungry and ordered some food: a steak sandwich with a bean salad, plus a mac-and-cheese, both of which were surprisingly good. I think we ended up getting home sometime before 4am, and I went to sleep soon afterwards, but not before chugging two bottles of water.

I was able to drag myself out of bed this morning at 8:30am, and was at work by 9:30am, but I'm certainly very glad it's Friday. I don't operate well on four hours of sleep, and I'm going to have to bus it to Jersey tonight.