I still love you New York

Things to Never Do in NYC, Esp. in the Company of Someone Like Your Sibling (Who Will Never Let You Forget):

Never…

1.  Lay down in a card store, overcome with hysterical albeit drunken laughter.

2.  Write any kind of celebratory card.  It will be ilegible and will possibly frighten the intended recipient.  And you won’t have any idea the next day what the blazes you wrote. 

3.  Do an interperative dance number in a gay bar on Fire Island, ala Cirque du So-Gay.  This will only win you the laughing camraderie of the residents, who will nickname you “High Steppin’ Cha Cha Lopez” for the rest of your visit.

4.  Make doody in a naked “merman’s” abandoned backpack.  Just don’t.  You’ll be haunted by the call of the “sea” for all time.  Or you might be chased by said merman atop his sea beast, armed with a conch. 

5.  Try to enjoy modern art while hungover and with low blood sugar.  You’ll only hate everything you see — or nearly.  You will, like me, “not hate the art, just hate what the art would be if it were a person.”

6.  Make friends in a bar.  Any bar.  Or any other place where alcoholic beverages are consumed.

7.  Wear sassy but impractical shoes for a “short” jaunt in the neighborhood.  “Short” is a pack of lies.  The person leading to your orthopaedic doom is not being malicious, it’s just that they live there and they forget that most people don’t sprint a mile to the coffee shop each day.

8.  Forget the beef jerky. 

9.  Refer to someone’s breasts as “funbags.”  It just sets the wrong tone. 

10.  Pack pairs of pants that might, at any moment, spiral down your legs because they’ve miraculously grown too large, leaving you exposed and hobbled. 

11. Expose anyone un-used to your taste in music to your ipod.  Apparently, I have a future as a DJ in a hospital for the paranoid and schizophrenic.

12.  Spend less than $35 for a movie.  If you do spend less, you will be missing out on the largest vat of popcorn imaginable.  This vat is best accompanied by some beef jerky, a litre of soda, and an inevitable trip to the “merman’s backpack.” 

13.  Make small talk or observations about the environment you happen to be in.  New Yorkers are cynical and will only take this chit-chatty manner as your attempt to sound like “a Highlights magazine for children.”  

14.  Take any guff from cab men.  One effective thing to do is snarl at them behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, “I will fuck you up, mother fucker.”

And finally:

15.  Tell the leering Mexican waiter that you and your brother are, in point of fact, brother and sister.  You will only be rewarded with more leering and a highly skeptical, “REALLY?!  Choo are brother and sister?!”