Resolutions, cont.

Yesterday, I made some real headway in fulfilling my New Year's Resolutions: I watched every episode of the Top Chef marathon on Bravo, while reading E! online.

That's right --at the same time. After all, one of the secrets of highly effective people is learning to multi-task. I know this because read a LOT of self-help books. And they all stress the importance of setting Primary and Secondary goals that complement one another, thus creating “synergy.” For instance, if you want to be a world-renowned opera singer, you might take voice lessons (Primary Goal), but you would also study Italian (Secondary Goal), for the obvious reason that Italian men are really hot, and if the opera career doesn't work out, at least you’ll have something to fall back on.

So, to go along with watching more T.V., I've also resolved to get less exercise. Not that I don't need the exercise, it's just that I don’t want anything to interfere with my Primary Goal (PG) of watching more T.V. The only Perceived Barrier (PB) to this goal (G) is that, living in Manhattan, we all do an absurd amount of walking. Not "mall walking" or "power walking," like in the suburbs. We call it "getting from one place to another"(GFOPTA).

Most days, for instance, I walk to work. Would that this were a tacit protest of the geo-political ramifications of fossil fuel usage, or time to contemplate goals and intentions for the coming day... But the truth is, walking is just WAY quicker than the crosstown bus, which at rush hour, takes 45 minutes to go a mile and a half. Every block or so, the bus stops to take on 50 people who have to find correct change, or the right metro card, or chatty tourists from Minnesota wanting to know if this is "the bus to Ground Zero," mistaking the M2 bus for one going back in time to 2002.

Almost nobody in the City has a car, so that's not really a solution for reaching my laziness goals in the New Year. At one point, I thought about bringing up my car from Florida. But then it occured to me that having a car in New York would be about as useful as having a pony. It's cute and you can ride it occasionally and stroke its mane, but where do you put it?

That, and you have to wake up early every morning to take care of it. Those of you who live in NYC know that I'm NOT joking, although the City of New York possibly is:

Above is the sign for "No Sweeping." I mean, No Parking. If you see the broom, it means you can't park in the zone. Except when you can.

It’s called Alternate Side Parking. For the purposes of cleaning the streets and for the purposes of “Traffic Flow” (i.e., whatever unbelievably sinister activities this the code word for...) they alternate the sides of the street on which you can legally park. This happens every other day. Except, uh, when it doesn't.

But don't worry - if you need to know what side of the street you can/can’t park on, you can call a hotline, such as Psychic Friends Network, to find out. The schedule for Alternate Side Parking seems to be based on some non-linear algorithm related to the phases of the Mayan, or possibly the Druid calendar. (I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that higher-ups of the NYC Department of Transportation secretly practice human sacrifice.)
If you do happen to be parked on the wrong side of the street, your car will be towed, and you'll have to go to one of the outer boroughs to bail it out of car jail. Having a car in New York is like being related to Robert Downey, Jr. - you just never know when you’re going to get that phone call in the middle of the night. Only you can’t make the car go to AA. And A.A.A. won’t help.

Even if you were raised Presbyterian, if you have a car in the city, you can't wait for the festival of Idul-Fitr. Or the second day of Shavuot, or, or the Asian Lunar New Year. This is becase Alternate Side Parking is suspended on a variety of obscure religious holidays, like those Jewish holidays that even your rabbi never heard of (the same rabbi who can't wait for Ramadan, because he won't have to get up and move the station wagon).

What they don't tell you, of course, is that the entire Tri-State Area is a Designated Tow-Away Zone. Once, a friend of mine was moving and I was the sap who to "watch the van." I watched - and pleaded, and argued, and narrowly avoided arrest - as the car got a ticket anyway.

To make matters worse, you'll never see a car parked on the streets in New York that didn't look like it had just gone through some horribly traumatic experience. Whenever I go back home to Florida I'm always struck by how clean the cars all seem. And how all the bumpers are more or less intact.

And if you opt for a parking garage in Manhattan, you're not much better off. First, this can easily set you back $600 a month. And second, they stack your car up, kind of like those compartments for shoes at the bowling alley. No joke. They drive your car onto this jack, kind of like in a Warner Brothers cartoon. And then they raise it up and park another car beneath it, like so:

It's like playing Jenga. So nobody wants to actually get their car out of the lot, because they don't want the whole city to collapse under the weight of 50 late-model Lexuses (Lexii?).

Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a car in the first place.

So you can see my conundrum when it comes to transportation exerting minimal effort. I would get a bike, but that would still involve physical effort. Maybe I'll get a Vespa. Or, better yet, a Segue. That's when you know you're just a lazy fcuk: when you spend $5,000 on something that goes slower than you can walk. But sometimes, you just have to exceed your own expectations...