Just Got Here This Morning

Context: This post is about the second day of my New York City trip.

As soon as the plane descended, things went wrong.

I mentioned in my last post that I was getting over a cold. When we left, I felt slightly sick, but not so sick it was worth mentioning. Which is a figurative expression, since I just mentioned it. Also I mentioned it in my last post. As I mentioned. The word "mention" is starting to lose all meaning for me.

Anyways, shortly after we began to descend, someone committed murder on my ears.

The pressure. The pressure! It was like being in a black hole, or 20,000 leagues under the sea, or on a blind date with a friend's favorite cousin. My ears were screaming. Sobbing. Cursing their existence.

My face, however, was placid.

I don't know why this is, but anytime I am in a public location and I feel any kind of physical or emotional pain or discomfort, I immediately think, "No one must know!" and then do my best to not give any sign that I am in distress. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't.

In this instance, I was very stoic. I said nothing to Little Sister nor made any sign to her that I wanted nothing more than to rip my ears out of my head and/or chew a stick of gum.

I know what you're probably thinking. You're probably thinking, "Ear pain is a common symptom of flying, Awkward Mormon Girl! Surely an experienced traveler such as yourself must have prepared for this possibility by bringing some gum."

Well, you'd think I'd think of that, but I've been on many, many airplanes, and the last time my ears bothered me was ten years ago or more. I thought I'd outgrown it.

But apparently that was a foolish thing to think, because my ears felt like victims of Lizzie Borden. Since I didn't have any gum, I resorted to opening and closing my jaw repeatedly as if I were chewing on some. Then, when that didn't work, I reached into my carry-on for some beef jerky.

"Ooh, can I have some?" Little Sister said brightly. Still stoic, I silently tore my salvation in two and handed her half.

Except not even chewing on a tough piece of beef jerky made my ears pop. The pressure was building and it hurt sooo bad and I just couldn't wait for the plane to land so that my ears would pop and it would all be over.

Well, presently the plane landed. And the pain on my ears subsided, but they did not pop. They remained clogged with pressure.

Has this ever happened to you? It had never happened to me. I was flabbergasted and extremely worried. So worried I didn't say a single thing about it until Older Sister said, "The pressure didn't pop in one of my ears and now I can't really hear out of it."

This confession led me to share that the same thing had happened to me, but in both of my ears, and that I could scarcely hear anything whatsoever.

Glory, who is an RN like my mother, determined that these phenomena were somehow due to the fact that I was almost over a cold and Older Sister was in the midst of one. She then gave us both a lot of medical advice, which was well-meaning but which didn't really seem to help.

We gathered our luggage and took the airtrain to Jamaica Station. This is an approximation of an actual conversation Older Sister and I had on the airtrain:

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: (says something)

OLDER SISTER: What? What did you say?

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: What? I can't hear you.

OLDER SISTER: What?

So there we were, about to head into a large, crowded city where you can be perfectly safe as long as you are careful and alert. We could still be careful, but it's hard to be alert when you can barely hear.

At Jamaica Station, we bought weeklong subway passes. Then we ventured onto the subway for the very first time.

These passes worked in a simple manner. We were entitled to an endless amount of subway rides for seven days; however, I found out that if you swiped your pass at a turnstile and pushed your luggage through said turnstile ahead of you, you couldn't swipe immediately after because the card would tell you it had just been used. This was probably meant to deter people from going through the turnstile and handing their pass back to others behind them for repeated use, but it was quite problematic for me. I solved this problem by vaulting over the turnstile. Interestingly, no one seemed to notice or tried to stop me.

We encountered various other problems with using our subway passes over the next week, and we continued to solve these problems in increasingly creative ways, including one instance where Little Sister and I went through a revolving door entrance as a single person.

This first day, we found the subway train that would get us to Times Square and rode said subway train for what seemed like an eternity. We'd barely slept on the plane, but there were no available seats on our subway car so we were standing the entire ride. C'est la vie.

Once we got off at Times Square, we hauled our luggage up a long (and dirty. The subway stations in New York are just as dirty as people say) flight of stairs, and then emerged from the famed mode of underground transportation into Times Square, Manhattan, and New York City!

Immediately, we set about to find our hotel. It was on Times Square, not too far from the subway at all, but it took us a while to grow accustomed to the layout. We got turned around a few times, which meant that we crossed a lot of streets.

Nobody in New York City seems to know how to cross a street safely. When the Don't Walk symbol is up at the crosswalk, the pedestrians glance around for any cars and then walk straight through. When there's a Do Walk symbol, they walk across in a long, thick stream of humans that continues long after the light turns green.

I had a conversation in my head with the New York City pedestrians, which went something like this:

I said, "Don't you know that you're supposed to stay on the sidewalk unless there's a Do Walk symbol at the crosswalk?"

To which they replied, "Sidewalk? This city is our sidewalk. The world is our sidewalk!"

This clued me in that you just can't do anything with New York City pedestrians, at least not the ones in my head. To be fair, though, the drivers were about the same. Red lights, green lights--it didn't matter. They continually pressed forward in an effort to somehow get through the masses of people.

Because there were so many people. Especially during the evenings. Everything was crowded, though not unpleasantly so, I thought. However, on this first morning I was unable to fully appreciate this interesting sense of being crowded, or much of anything else that was around me, due to my ears.

Some people say that when one sense of theirs is damaged, the rest are heightened. That was not true in this case. It seemed like when my ears became impaired, the rest of my senses became impaired too. As the sounds of the city were muted, so, it seemed, were the sights and smells and feelings.

Eventually, we made it to our hotel. We'd landed around 6 a.m. Now it was around 8. Check-in wasn't until 4 p.m., but we were able to drop off our luggage and head out into the city to be tourists.

First adventure of the day: the Empire State Building! We walked to said building, got in line, and used our New York City passes to obtain tickets.

By this point, my ears were popping at random. Which would be good, except that they would immediately clog up again. Also, the popping was extremely painful. I had long since abandoned the stoicism and would give a little shriek each time the pressure ruptured.

All the signs and the attendants bragged that it took the elevator less than one minute to get to the 80th floor. Indeed, the elevator took us up quite high quite fast. The elevation change caused my ears to pop rapidly.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Ow ow ow ow ow ow.

Then we looked out over the city, which was impressive, but which didn't require a lot of time. So we took the elevator back down-

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: Ow ow ow ow ow ow.

-and headed to Junior's for lunch. On the way, we checked out some shops at Times Square and bought postcards, t-shirts, and other souvenirs.

Lunch at Junior's was okay. The city was pretty chilly our first day, but the inside of Junior's was even chillier. On the up side, this kept us awake, but on the down side, it was, well, cold.

I had a BLT. BLTs all taste about the same, but this one brought to mind the one that Viola's parents bought me at IHOP for Viola's fourteenth birthday celebration. Both that sandwich and the one I ate at Junior's were too tall to fit in my mouth easily. This made both of them difficult to eat.

After lunch, we looked around Times Square some more. Glory, who was totally beat, and Older Sister, who was heading that way, sat on benches while Little Sister and I, who had a little more energy, checked out the Times Square Disney store.

It was just like the Disney store at home, but bigger, and with bigger things. There was a Snow White doll the size of a small child and a wall mural with the silhouettes of beloved Disney characters that stretched all the way up the stairs.

LITTLE SISTER: This sign says that there's a Frozen wonderland upstairs.

AWKWARD MORMON GIRL: They have a Junior's up there?

At this point, our hotel had prepared a room for us early (it was around 1 p.m.), and since Glory was so tired, we soon went back to the hotel and napped. Even though Obnoxiouses don't nap on vacation...going all day on just a few hours of sleep was too much, even for us.

After nap time (which lasted like four hours), we dressed up in preparation for dinner and Matilda. Except that Older Sister decreed that we would not get dinner, but go back to Junior's and get cheesecake in lieu of dinner. This second trip to Junior's was a lot more successful. My chocolate mousse cheesecake looked so good that a lady asked me, "What are you eating?" and it tasted so good that I told her she should buy some.

Then we went to the Shubert Theatre to see Matilda, a perfect choice for our first Broadway show: wacky and joyful, with great music, great lyrics, a great book, great characters, great set, great choreography, great special effects, and a great cast of talented children. In a word, this show was great.

At the end of the last ensemble number, a shower of confetti was released from the ceiling. It felt like a celebration not only of the Trunchbull's exit from Crunchem Hall, but of our very first day in New York City.

Upon exiting the Shubert Theatre, we pushed through the crowded streets to get back to our hotel. I showered, got ready for bed...and prayed that in the morning, my ears would no longer feel like Jack the Ripper had done a number on them.