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I spent last weekend with a pastor, a New York bound designer, Brannon, a blind, morbidly obese geriatric Golden Retriever who didn't answer to the name "Paddington," and 8.1 million people. I and Brannon McA burned off our excess carbs gallivanting about the Large Apple.

We visited several apparel stores and I purchased footwear which I have declared to be "hip." They are extraneous to my wardrobe and stunningly impractical, but I satisfied my primal consumer urges and took my part in humanity's eternal and universal effort to fill up the infinite void one shoebox at a time.

We stopped in at GAP and I felt at home, sort of the way you do when you find a bunch of Americans huddled inside a McDonalds in the middle of Tokyo. I felt that the employees there liked me, maybe even secretly knew my name.

Then we visited the Diesel store. It was as if I were in 7th grade all over again. That's when you start the school year only to find out that being unathletic like I was is akin to cross-dressing, and having your mother still pick out your clothes earns you a non-refundable one-way ticket into Dorkdom. The store had its own DJ, for goodness sake, a metro-hipster dreadlocked giant-headphone-wearing DJ. And a single pair of pants would cost a week of my wages. The employees, I'm sure, snickered silently as I walked by, and they leaned back a few inches lest they be afflicted by the fallout of the Southeastern hickness I radiated. I combated my self-consciousness by telling myself, in soothing motherly tones, that I was the normal one here. Normalcy is the consolation prize of bumpkins.

The dining fare was exquisite. Brannon and I traipsed about Times Square very late Monday night and we managed to slip into this neat little Italian joint I discovered (View image) for some grub. We tried out various hotbars, unfurled our prayer rugs at several of the local Starbucks, and I even got a Gyro (which the waitress politely informed me was pronounced Jai-Roe) at a Mexican restaurant.