Taking Manhattan

I have so much I could tell you right now, but so far I can summarize the first two days of my trip by saying that it has been serendipitous and lucky and so far I'm having an even better time than I thought I would.
I could tell you about how Mandi and I almost missed our 7 a.m. flight on Tuesday morning and managed to get on board the plane literally five minutes before it took off, and yet somehow our bags made it onto the same flight.
I could tell you how awesome it is to have my best TCU friend and my best grad program friend together in one place and to realize that they seem to like each other as much as I like both of them.
I could ramble on and on for days about how Mandi, Kymberli and I decided on a whim to try to do the lottery for A Chorus Line tickets on Tuesday night, knowing that in order for all three of us to see the show two of us would have to win the lottery (since it's only two tickets per person), and also knowing that we'd showed up five minutes before the lottery was supposed to end and so our chance of getting tickets was slim to none. And yet Kymberli's name was drawn, and a moment later my name was drawn, too, and we sat in the very front row, so close that I could put my hand out and touch the stage, and we saw the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line for only twenty dollars!!
I could (and probably will, when I'm home and have the time) regale you with Ashley's Great Subway Debacle of 2007. To make a very long story extremely short, I missed seeing Talk Radio with the girls this afternoon because I was too busy taking the subway to Brooklyn against my will. The downside to this was that I was out the forty bucks I'd paid to order the ticket online. The incredibly awesome upside, however, was that I ended up having a wonderful afternoon on my own. I wandered around the DUMBO area and sat on a pier under the Brooklyn Bridge and ate ice cream from a shop I'd read about in my guidebook before I left home and then happened across totally by accident. Then I walked the mile across the Brooklyn Bridge footpath, something I've always wanted to do but never done before because not many other people want to walk a mile across a bridge just to take some pictures and I'd never tried to talk any traveling companion into it. But this afternoon the weather was perfect and I just so happened to be in Brooklyn by myself with no one else to answer to, so I just did it on a whim. And it was amazing, and beatiful, and so much better than I even thought it would be, and I was just having a MOMENT, you know? And finally at one point when I was almost back to Manhattan I got sort of emotionally overwhelmed with I don't even know what-being here again, thinking about 9/11 and history in general and then the strangeness of life in general, thinking about how wonderful it was to be all alone by myself for a few hours to just be independent in the city and how all this independence is such a key part of me and my life, and thinking about all of that I had to stop on the bridge and wrap my hand around one of the cables and say, "Thank you, whatever it is that put me here, because I'd never want a life other than this one, flaws and all."

There's so much I could tell you, and I will try, when I get home.