Work got off to a kickstart on Friday when I got a frantic phone call from a woman named Carol. “What will they do about the different set colors when the show moves? Will black and blue really work?” she pleaded. It took me a moment to realize that she was making a serious inquiry about the potential cosmetic mistake of black and blue. This was something that was keeping her up at night. I took down her phone number and told her I’d give it to the right person, knowing full well that her number would ultimately end up in the trash. I’m sorry, Carol.

Someone brought up talk of a new movie that was coming out called Hamlet 2. The basic synopsis is that a disgraced high school drama teacher writes a sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s supposed to be funny and sounded exactly like the type of thing I’d like to see. I made a mental note to that effect.

While distributing some mail, I saw a pre-release DVD screener for Hamlet 2 sitting out. With a twinkling in my toes, I ran to the interns I had just shared the conversation with. “Guys, I hate to put the thought in your head, but there’s a copy of the movie in the office.”

So we watched it. Of course we watched it.

After work I followed Alex back to his place in the Pierre Hotel, just outside Central Park. His aunt and uncle own an apartment in the building and he’s staying there. He warned me before opening the door - “My aunt is an interior decorator, so she uses this place to experiment.” I braced myself and followed him inside.

“Here we have the world’s smallest kitchen,” he explained.

“And over there must be the world’s purplest living room,” I said.

Purple carpet. Purple couches. Purple-dominant paintings on the wall. It looked like someone just murdered a thousand lilacs.

“Don’t get me started,” he said.

We were soon off for a long walk through Central Park. I’ve spent a pretty significant amount of time in the city before moving here, but I had never actually made it to the Park. I wish I had. There’s innumerable oddities to be seen and treasured. Like the shirtless guy, dancing on rollerblades while bouncing a racquetball. It was a sight to behold.

Why does it seem that this entire city is made up of two kinds of people - beautiful women and crazy men?

We walked through Strawberry Fields, past the crowd of smelly people on their Beatles vision quest arranging flowers into a peace sign. Don’t listen to the naysayers - you can end suffering with strategically placed horticulture.

Once Alex heard my embarrassing confession - that I had not yet seen The Dark Knight - we were off to the IMAX theater. We bought our tickets and waited in line, only to realize we had accidentally purchased tickets for a conventional showing, not an IMAX. Gone would be the pleasures of watching this epic narrative on a 60-foot tall screen. The sweet, sweet auditory delight of that 3-D sound system would never grace our ear canals. So we settled for the standard showing and made it into a makeshift IMAX by sitting four rows from the front.

Walking back, well after dark, all we could say to each other was some variation on “That was awesome!”

Today we explored Harlem. Alex bought a bootleg copy of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It employed the standard method to pilfer a movie, in which someone sneaks a camcorder into a theater and videotapes the entire film. Watching it back at his place, Alex continually critiqued the illegitimate cameraman’s technique.

“Zooming in now? Are you kidding me?! Nothing’s going on! Wait for some rising action, you numbskull!”

We had dinner at this filthy dive bar in the Upper East Side. It was cheap and good, but those two words are starting to mean the same thing to me.