Weekday Brad Lives for the Weekend

At the moment, I am in a nondescript office building in Hackensack, NJ, running fake analyses of catastrophe risk. This is weekday Brad in a nutshell. Weekend Brad is far different. He lives a glamorous lifestyle that includes a 2-hour busride through Weehauken, Hoboken, and North Bergen that culminates in a grand arrival at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. From there, his travels take him all over that fair island.

I have little photographic evidence of my adventures. Little, save one small nugget. A friend and I trekked all the way to 112th and Broadway to see the diner featured in Seinfeld. On the show, characters refer to it as Monk's, but it's actually Tom's. I was extremely creeped out by the manager. And the food. It was terrible despite the fact that they still make a "Big Salad". (Aside: the photo to the right, which provides irrefutable proof of the event, was taken on an iPhone.)

I had another encounter with TV stardom. One of the judges on America's Next Top Model, Nigel Barker, happened to walk past me while I was sitting outside a cafe in the Chelsea Market. Mr. Barker is a judge on the show, a photographer, and a former male model. He was with his wife (also a model) and young son (soon to be a model). I later found out that my girlfriend thinks Mr. Barker is very attractive. Needless to say, I wish I had seized the opportunity to "eliminate" the competition.

I did a lot of other things in the city that mostly involved existing in the vicinity of various landmarks and neighborhoods. I saw the UN Building and briefly contemplated what would happen if I tried to scale the fence. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and noted that my friend and I were perhaps the only native English-speakers to walk across it. I saw the skating rink at Rockefeller Center where a dirty hippie fell hard on the ice while holding his girlfriend. I walked though Chelsea, SoHo, Greenwich Village, the Meatpacking District, TriBeCa, NYU, Columbia University, the Financial District, parts of Central Park, Grand Central Station, the Upper East Side, and Times Square. I nearly bought bootleg DVDs on Canal Street. I sat in Washington Square Park for an hour watching pedestrians avoid or fail to fully avoid stepping on a dead rat (New Yorkers have an innate ability to avoid a rat without having noticed it).

So maybe I didn't have a "glamorous" weekend. It was more of a "get-as-much-NYC-stuff-as-possible-squeezed-into-2-days" weekend. The best part was watching the New Yorkers step on a dead rat.