For the first time in about two weeks, our apartment is perfectly quiet. Except for the sound of gunshots, repeatedly going off in the background. I'll get to that in a minute.

My cousin Kitty and her daughter, Lauren, 16, and her friend Monica, 14, just left. It was a fun visit. I learned a lot about lip gloss (cheap stuff stays on better than Juicy Tubes), text messaging (will eventually replace need for computers), and water polo (which is not, in fact, played on inflatable raft-horses ... ha ha, New York cousins are very gullible ... ). Remarkably, they weren't joking when they said that water polo is a real sport. Apparently, it primarily involves high school and/or college girls grabbing other girls bathing suits. Throw in Ron Jeremy and Gary Coleman, and it sounds like the premise of pretty much every TV reality show.

The girls they did their obligatory part to keep New York's thriving tourist (a.k.a. fake handbag) industry afloat. They even took the Staten Island Ferry one day while I was at work, because this is the best way to see the Statue of Liberty. If you're not too distracted looking at the dude with the spaghetti strainer on his head.

"Ohmigod, we saw sooooo many crazy people today!" Lauren exclaimed on Thursday night.

"Uh ... I think the preferred medical term is 'wacko.'"

"So, this one dude? On the subway? He, like, walked right by us, and pointed his finger at my map, and didn't even look at us, but kept walking and kept pointing ..." The scene was re-created by Monica and Lauren, like in the flashback sequences with questionable production values in those real-life detective shows.

"Then this other guy came up to us, and he said something--dunno what--and then he started slapping himself on the cheek!" Monica demonstrated. "And then, omigod, some other dude was talking to a tin can. Calling it Melvin..."

"And then, there was this other guy, and - get this - he was wearing a Bush-Cheney 2004 shirt!"

Okay, the last part's not true, but it's just a random example of the absolutely crazy sh*t you get immune to living in New York. I'm sure I see just as many crazy people in the course of any random day, but those of us who live here just learn to filter them out. We filter out a lot of stuff.
A fun New York game is to think of some random thing or phenomenon, and decide to notice it that day. For instance, decide to see nickels on the sidewalk (they're all over the place), or asterisks carved into posts or signs, or piles of barf in subway stations. A friend once said, "have you ever noticed that everyone in New York waits to go down into the subway before they hurl?" I said, that's crazy, you don't know what you're talking about! Surefire, that afternoon I went down into the subway to find a giant pile of human vomit. Of course, this is not so much a testament to synchronicity and the quantum interconnectedness of things so much as the consistently low sanitation standards of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. But after that, I noticed barf in the subway all the time. And now, I've passed the gift along to you.

We also went to a lot of museums. I only live a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim and the National Academy Museum, which has the distinction of never having been visited by anyone. Not even the mothers of the artsist whose work is on display. I often feel sorry for this museum, wedged between the infinitely more interesting Cooper-Hewitt and the Gugg. I almost want to go visit it, for the same bizarre reasons that I kind of wanted to break our washing machine because I genuinely felt bad for the Maytag repairman. He seemed to represent-- along with the Dunkin' Donuts guy-- the eternal, lingering ennui that is the inevitable by-product, a.k.a. "buy-product," of the American corporate establishment. (Clever readers will note that the previous sentence is a pile of pretentious crap that makes absolutely no sense. That is, unless you majored in Comp. Lit. or possibly Women's Studies, in which case you might mistake it for "a very salient point." Whatever that means.)

Anyway, we went to museums. I love the Met, and have ever since I read The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler when I was nine years old. The girls had never been to New York before, so I wanted to show them everything, such as how to get into the Met without paying (go in through the gift shop on the right, and you can walk straight into the museum), or how to use our Guggenheim membership to get four tickets in one day. It's important to teach young people how to rip off charitable institutions. These days, they've cut these subjects from the curriculum of most public schools. It's a darn shame.