Spring Break, New York City & Shoe Stores

I spent the first half of my spring break battling my allergies and the demons I call yearbook.

I spent the second half of my spring break battling my allergies, teenagers and New York City streets. (I left the yearbook demons back in Texas. I think attempting to smuggle them into New York City would have put me speedy quick on everyone’s watch list.)

So here I am in New York City with four newspaper staff members–four teenage girls to be exact–winding down our trip from our national journalism convention at Columbia University.

In between the requisite sightseeing, I even taught a little session about this blogging business. When I return to the Lone Star state, I’ll have to remember to do three things…

Thing #1… Smack my friend Sandy upside her head because she told me only one or two advisers would attend my little session. Instead, I had a pretty full crowd, and I didn’t even have to beg them to listen to me. A few had even read my book, and they loved it, too. (Hey, Oprah, are ya listening?)

My four staffers even said I did a good job, but I think they lie a lot, too. (You know, like my friend Sandy.) Since I’m fairly certainly I would get into trouble if I smacked them upside their little heads with the rubber chicken, I didn’t.

Thing #2… Eat Mexican food. Here’s a little tip in life… Never eat Mexican food north of the Red River. You’re just going to have to trust me on that one. (There’s probably a particular longitude and latitude that also applies to barbecue, but I’m not exactly sure where that is. However, I’m pretty sure the state of New York would not be included in the “It’s OK to eat barbecue here” map.)

Thing #3… Perform some sort of fancy, schmancy exorcism on the yearbook demons and try and finalize the yearbook… without injuring any students in the process…or going nuts & crazy…or making my Big Fat Stupid Head timer stop.  I think it will take some sort of divine intervention for the last item not to occur.

But before we get all misty eyed about the impending doom of the BFSH counter, I still have another 24 hours before I have to think yearbook, and I have one more night in the city that never sleeps.

So let’s try and keep these happy thoughts going. A real plus side of this trip was meeting up with one of my former newspaper editors who works at Simon and Schuster.

I told the girls we would be going to Rockefeller Center to meet Christina and that there would be free sodas and free books involved.

As we were walking, one of the girls asked, “Why are we getting free books and sodas from a shoe store?”

Me… “A shoe store?”

Staffer… “Yeah, you said she worked for a shoe store.”

Me…“No, I said she worked for Simon and Schuster. You know, the publishing company.”

My current editor-in-chief (the very cute, affable and matching Carson) did point out what a fabulous experience that would be—to have a store where you could not only buy shoes but read and buy books, too.

I guess we could call it The Shoe Knew…or the Shoe Boo… or The Shoebooka…

Yep, I think it’s time to head on back to Tejas.