How did August happen, seriously?

Anyhow, Friday evening was lovely, despite the horrid rain and humidity.  I met Ashley at the Whitney, which is open late on Fridays, and which also had an evening concert in conjunction with the Dan Graham show.  I believe this is the last of the summer concerts, but really fabulous events will be taking place into the fall regarding the show, so y’all should check it out.  Anyhow, I gave Ashley a tour of the museum–I love giving my friends tours–and of course was all emo about Friday having been my last day.  Sniff, sigh.

After tooling around the Whitney, Ashley and I stopped at Hale and Hearty for dinner and stopped at adorable puppy shop to look at adorable kittens and puppies including adorable King Charles Spaniels in the window so cute.  We then raced to the Met to try to get in a bit of visiting time before it closed at 9:00.  I left Ashley in the Egyptian section and did a quick-race-tour of the new American wing and the Afghanistan show.  The new American wing is beautiful: spacious, airy, regal and dignified, though I’m not sure how well it serves the small decorative artworks.  The Afghanistan show, works from the Kabul museum, was really stunning, gorgeous works in a gorgeous setting.  This might seem like an extremely imperialist not-politically-correct thing to say, but it disturbs/upsets me that the beautiful civilizations of places such as Kabul and Baghdad have crumbled so ingloriously.  That, however, is an essay for another day.

I love the Met.

Ashley and I then went downtown to meet up with Phil at St. Marks Place, though we took a detour to a used book store first and Ashley found the only book about Katherine Hepburn she does not yet own.  We stopped at a shwarma place because Phil needed food, and then we stopped at Red Mango because I always need Red Mango.  And then we stopped at an amazing Japanese grocery store because Japanese grocery stores are fantastic.  Ashley was all flipping out because she rediscovered all her favorite foods that she ate during her brief time in Japan.  We also bought a green-tea-red-bean-paste ball.  It was sweet but I found the filling a little too gritty for my taste, so I gave most of it to Ashley.  So cool!

We basically spent the rest of the evening wandering around the East Village, seeing what we saw, talking, bemoaning my impending departure from the city and enjoying the fact that the rain had stopped and the night was lovely.  One of my favorite things to do in this city is just to walk and see what you see, with no destination in mind, just the meandering journey through the streets of the city.  And we did see some fun, artsy things in windows.  Including a sign that inspired this photoshoot:

Aw, my amazing friends.

We also walked by a window installation of a gallery whose name I could not find.  Said installation was of felt-constructed severed heads on sticks.  Piggy has the conch!

We eventually ended up in Union Square for a bit more discussion of things such as Xanadu and the singing of songs from Ragtime.  At least I sang.  Nyah.

Oh, two random celebrity sightings from the week:  I saw John Oliver from The Daily Show in front of Cooper Union on Thursday night and we passed LIEV SCHRIEBER (!!!) enjoying dinner at a cafe by Union Square last night.   Eee.

Allright, time to resume readying the apartment for impending parental arrival.  I leave Monday (?!?!?) but am spending the rest of the weekend with the parents, so expect a few more updates before I head back to Chapel Hill.