New York, New York

True (and random) story: I'm not the biggest fan of Bret Easton Ellis. I read Rules of Attraction earlier this year and thought his satire was superficial. The writing, however, is usually amusing and addicting. When choosing books to bring with me to Argentina, I knew that while Ellis is rarely enlightening, he is almost always entertaining.

It was this mindset that I chose American Psycho to read today, the story of a Wall Street businessman (it's not clear exactly what he does for a living) who also happens to be a bizarre and erratic serial killer. The story is a mockery of the decadence of the 1980s in NYC; (apparently Ellis doesn't appreciate glam rock). Ellis makes his point very clear: the narrator spends nearly half the novel just describing the label and price of the character's clothes; Ellis italicizes certain syllables of their dialogue to highlight their pretentious way of talking; the men read GQ more than the Wall Street Journal and regularly cheat on their girlfriends with their friends' wives. Ellis makes it clear that these people are, without doubt, disgusting.

So here's the problem: I want to hang out with them.

No, it's not that I want to taunt the homeless with singles or that I want to score cocaine in some club for models, investment bankers, and their illicit, but tolerated, affairs. It's really more that I want to be in NYC.

I want to eat fancy dinners that cost over $50.00. I want to walk through Times Squares gazing upward at the neon lights. I want to go to Broadway, to the Met, to Columbia, to anywhere I can be surrounded by giant skyscrapers and millions of people. Sitting in my 200 person Catholic school in rural South America, New York couldn't be more glamorous...even when viewed from the perspective of a Republican serial killer.

Seriously, right now I love New York more than Flava Flav does. And THAT is saying a lot.

(Actually, it doesn't because Flava Flav ended up picking the other girl. But I have a theory that VH1 executives forced him to do it because they knew she would make such a great spin-off series. Zach: please discuss this in your Stanford "Conspiracy Theories" class).