"I can't believe I paid 15 bucks for this?!" exclaims my exasperated friend Dan as we headed up the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Although he might have thought of wringing my neck for dragging him all the way here, my other two friends are wringing their stomachs, faces pale from the nauseating climb up a parking-lot style ramp of wonder. The exhibition was an exercise of various artistic media- moving pictures to still life- to confront a dramatic perspective of our biological nature. Everything that wasn't plasticized was covered in vaseline goo, and flat screens in the atrium and elsewhere showed various parts of a continuous mythological film that was both absurd and perverse. Although the art never really made much sense, I read later that afternoon that the artist's theme was based exclusively on a muscle that regulated testicular ascension and decension. Satisfied with this epiphany, it was soon very clear to me that my appetite for dinner had completely vanished.

New York City is a megalopolis of contrasts. A simple jog from the boathouse in Central Park to the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square shows that the city isn't the monotony of over-scaled office buildings some claim it to be. Favorite spot? Forget skating in the winter at Rockefeller Center- sip a margarita on ice at the very same place in the heat of the summer. The colored lights of a glorious fountain, the serenity of the shiny stone buildings above, the reassuring tapping of jazz- this is New York at its finest.