Last week I took a vacation – a grown up vacation that did not include visiting grandparents or a single episode of Dora the Explorer. Crazy – I know.

It was necessary though because one half of my brain resides inside someone else’s brain – but that person lives really far away (in California) and every so often we have to get together so for a little while we can feel like a whole person – its like a mental health check.

I would say 96% of the time our thoughts/interests/ideas of superiority are perfectly simpatico but not always – he watches “Mad Men” while I’m all about “Game of Thrones.” (Idiot)

Part of this mental health check involves cocktails (many many cocktails) lots of sarcasm and often times trips to places we have never been before – to broaden our common mind. Last week we boarded an early morning bus and made our way to the Big Apple to buy souvenir t-shirts and search for the cash cab. I was all about taking avant guard photos of outside cafes and sweaty tourists but my BFF had a crazy notion that we should do more than walk around aimlessly searching for the most expensive bloody Mary in Manhattan – he convinced me we should check out the Museum of Modern Art. I took a great deal of time to explain to him that I would be happy to go but that I am not a good museum goer and have about a 40 minute window before I pool into a puddle of four-year-old crankiness. I was clear about this.

So, our second day in the city, after a wholesome croissant filled breakfast we took our fully charged cameras and descended upon MoMA and I was good… for awhile….

You see I like art and I want really hard to be able to appreciate it and when I first enter a museum I am at peace with the quiet and the hoards of slow gawkers standing around. MoMA is six stories tall and the first three floors are all ‘instillation’ art… I don’t get it but I can deal with it – I can deal with it until I end up watching a movie of a street performer tying a towel over the head of a monkey and making it dance until it dies of suffixation. At that point I was ready to leave, but we were still on the first floor and my BFF was going on and on about all the cool stuff that was ahead of us upstairs. I followed along wishing that I had been allowed to bring my back pack in with me so that at least I could have some water… or something.

We walked through two more floors of art that I imagined I could recreate if I was in prison and only had access to homemade ink, cheap muslin, heartache and rage.  By the time we finally ascended to the permanent exhibit I had gone through the twelve complete stages of internal melt down, suddenly I HATED everyone in that museum with the passion of a giant super nova. I couldn’t breathe, I could hardly contain my rage at being stuck in this seemingly endless white tunnel of quiet contemplation (my mind works in mysterious ways). I heard faintly through the pounding inside my own head my BFF remark in awe “look this is the Warhol room and over there is Picasso!” I  shrugged him off with a vague ‘yeah yeah’ as a pushed people out of my way to find the closest exit…. I tried really hard not to start screaming out loud while he stopped to photograph Van Gough and discuss how he never really liked Pollack’s color pallet… Finally, almost in tears I offered him the entire contents of my savings account if we could please exit this art filled purgatory and go get something to drink.

Because he is a good friend he didn’t argue (although he did stop to use the bathroom) and we proceeded out the closest exit and made our way to the nearest french bistro where I spent $30 for two glasses of Chardonnay and bad service.

It was the best $30 I ever spent.