In honor of the record high temps in NYC, I’ve decided to make today the official drop date of Mix of the Summer 2010. If you’ve received it before now, consider yourself lucky.

If you don’t have it in your hot little hands yet, let me know and I’ll do my best to get you a copy.

Click on the super fancy album design at right to see the full track listing. (And try not to judge me for my shameless affinity for pop music.)

Me gusto mucho el verano.

This weekend boasted outing upon outing, adventure upon adventure, one insanely awesome foray into the depths of Manhattan after another. If I seem to be oozing hyperbole, you are indeed right.

But it was nonetheless a very fun weekend because my high school pals Arden Elise and Christine came to visit me in the Big Apple! I would say that they got to live life on the town a little more than me (FAO Schwartz anyone? I hear it gets pretty crunk there…) but their visit was capped by a group outing to the Tony Awards.

For those of you that do not know, the Tony Awards are the Super Bowl of Broadway theatre, the World Cup of showtunes as host Sean Hayes (or rather the Tony Awards staff writers) put it. Which doesn’t mean that it gets a lot of viewers. It means that people in the industry get really worked up over it and spend a lot of time predicting who will win and what that will mean for various careers.

I was mostly worried about what to wear. Because I got the tickets for free via work, I did not want to disappoint anyone with my less-than-black-tie attire. So I bought a tuxedo-ish jacket and vest just for the occasion. Which I plan to return tomorrow. Do not judge me.

Really, the whole night was an absolute blast. Getting to go to the celebration of a year’s worth of work in this industry before I’ve even celebrated the one-year anniversary of my employment (that would be tomorrow, actually) was a privilege and an honor. Plus, this show won Best Musical. Which made me truly ecstatic.

The best part of the event was getting to experience it with two such close friends. I always knew when I graduated high school that I would never find friends quite like the ones I made there. And while I am very lucky to have a stable of rockin’ compadres in tow currently, I still fall right back in to place with my fellow Cougars.

Please consider this is a blanket invitation for any of my high school friends to come visit me immediately.

Case in point: I spent all of last week wishing a fond farewell to someone who has become a very dear friend to me. But instead of it being sad, it was more of a celebration. A celebration of friendships and a celebration of the beauty this city offers when the sun decides to come out. Monday was a Sunnyside game night featuring my favorite new Tetris-meets-Battleship obsession Blokus. Tuesday was a trip to see what I know to be the most innovative new musical on Broadway this season. (Insert heated debate.) Wednesday was another Sunnyside game night. And Blokus made an appearance. But so did Uno Stacko. And some really gross fruint punch. Thursday was a hiatus but then the weekend kicked into full gear with Bourbon Street shenanigans on Friday, Penn Station-area fun on Saturday and a truly lovely Washington Heights Sunday brunch topped off by an incredibly blissful day in Central Park. Blokus made an appearance. And so did a bagpiper whom I now hate.

This city moves so quickly that you barely get time to recognize what an awesome time you’re having let alone blog about it. But may this serve as my promise to you, dear reader(s), I will make this the summer of blogging. I am going to fill your life with so many inane thoughts about and images of life in this city that you’re going to wish you could revert back to the days when all I blogged about was my junior year AP English paper. Which I posted in its entirety. And you may find here.

Traveling To and From This City Is a Breeze | That is… unless you’re attempting to fly in the midst of the aforementioned blizzard-like conditions. In which case I pity your soul. But if you’re not, I defy you to show me how getting in and out of this city is anything but a piece of cake. I had the pleasure of taking an impromptu working trip to Boston thanks to this show wherein I purchased a train ticket one day and found myself coasting along the Cape the next, arriving at my destination in the time it would normally take me to do my laundry on a Saturday. It was so quick. And so peaceful. And I didn’t even have to check my bags. I heart train trips.

Nicholas Sparks Movies Suck | Okay, so maybe this is more of a well-known fact, but I actually kind of liked The Notebook. Regardless of that admission, this really cool friend of mine talked me into seeing the new one with the girl from Mamma Mia and Mean Girls and that one guy from Step Up and… Yeah. It was really bad. And not really bad in the sense that, “Oh, they could have done better.” But really bad in the sense that nothing could have saved a story this bizarre and unlikeable… not even Meryl Streep… or free puppies at the door. In fact, it was so bad that we had to cleanse ourselves of its illogical stench by buying another exorbitantly priced movie ticket (read $17.50) on something that didn’t suck so bad. It was worth it.

You Always Have Friends In New York | A lot of people think that moving here means you have to wade through a sea of unknown faces until you find some wayward soul to call your friend. I have found the opposite to be true. There are indeed a lot of people here, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of them are complete strangers. (Well, actually, the majority of them are… but that’s beside the point.) I count myself very lucky that I have more pals around this city, in my office, around the corner, up the street, etc. than I would if I still lived elsewhere. New York is a hotbed of social opportunity. You just have to embrace it as such.

What is it about being sick that bothers me so much?

I’ve been like this ever since elementary school. I know what you’re thinking… “What kind of self-respecting nine-year-old wouldn’t have jumped at the opportunity to eat popsicles and watch The Price Is Right all day?”  I had a tendency to get so caught up in thinking about how much information I would be missing and how much work I would have to do to get caught up that it almost wasn’t worth taking the day for myself.

I’m still like this.  Except instead of popsicles it’s hot tea and honey. And instead of The Price is Right it’s anything but The Price Is Right because Drew Carey cannot hold a candle to Bob Barker.

While much of my anti-sickness preoccupation is still centered upon agonizing over how much I’ll have to hustle to get back on top of e-mails and work-related items, I think it has  just as much to do with giving off the impression that I’m not perfect. (Shhhhh… don’t tell anyone.)

Seriously though, I’ve always been so dead-set on pleasing other people and proving to them that I am 100% capable of doing anything and everything passed my way that I forget to take care of myself in the process. Which is really dumb when you think about it. Because when I don’t take care of myself I know for a fact that it almost always leads to getting sicker. And that’s Bad News Bears on a whole new level.

I need to get better at this whole taking care of myself thing. Because, at this point, nobody else is doing it for me!

The cruise itself was pretty fun. I’ve never been on one before and I liken it to summer camp for adults. You’re holed up with a bunch of people you will never see again for the rest of your life but you resolve to become best friends for seven days if only to make it through the mirage of organized games with some semblance of sanity. Next time I go, I’ll probably bring an entourage (or a good book… I caught up on TV movies and season 4 of “How I Met Your Mother” this time around), but the white sandy beaches and Caribbean air were just the ticket to relaxation. Which I needed. Like wo.

Now that I’m back in the city, I have to decide which one of my one trillion New Year’s resolutions I’m going to keep. I usually don’t make any, but this year I thought there’s so much I want to do that there’s no harm in at least saying I will do them and and if I don’t follow through no one will be the wiser.

One of them is to blog more. (I’m well on my way!)

Another is to use the one-year gym membership I spent a pretty penny on last summer and have neglected ever since. They sent me an e-mail this morning saying that my first six months with them I only got 6 out of a possible 24 new member medals. Wah Wah. As if I needed a reminder of my laziness. Or of my failed bid at this year’s Winter Olympics. It will get better though… as soon as it’s warm enough to walk to the gym every morning. Soooooo… April?

I also want to grocery shop instead of eating out all the time, learn the entire Adobe creative suite, take more pictures, go to church more, resurrect my other blog, go out more with new friends in this wonderful city, keep up more with old friends via phone and snail mail, get back into literature and floss daily.

Sound doable?

As per usual, she was correct.

It just never occurred to me that parts of living up here would be un-fun. I mean, it’s New York. Glamorous. Sophisticated. Always something to do. Too bad “glamorous” can mean chaining yourself to the laundromat every other Saturday morning because that is the only feasible window you will ever have two uninterrupted hours to cleanse your lights and darks. To that end, “sophisticated” can mean ignoring the belligerent rants of the homeless man on the subway. And “always something to do” translates directly to “never leaving your office… ever.”

In light of this realization, I made a concerted effort this weekend to remind myself why I picked this city and why it is still the bomb diggity.

On Friday evening, I hung out in a trashy Penn Station pub with some of my favorite Belmont faces waiting for some out-of-town friends to arrive. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, playing host in this city keeps you on your toes by making you an eternal advocate of all its eclectic glory.) After their bus arrived, we moseyed on down to the only place to be found on the Lower East Side before making a few really bad, diabetic coma-spawning decisions around 2am.

Saturday meant sleeping in until it was time to try my hand at lottery tickets with a favorite former intern. Didn’t win. But that’s okay when you live here and can try any day you want! The rain didn’t keep me and the out-of-towners from patronizing the greatest art museum this side of the Atlantic (which is made all the more sweet when you can get your little entry button for a mere one dollar bill). After that, it was another lottery ticket attempt with another Belmont favorite which also came up short but happened to be across the street from an equally solid Broadway offering which I didn’t mind seeing for the fourth time (even if it was standing room only). Dinner with the visitors and scoffing at $15 cover charges in favor of downtown chicness capped the evening.

And now it’s Sunday. The sun is out, my tummy is full with brunch and I’m looking at another day of absolutely nothing to do but enjoy this town.

The honeymoon may be over, but this relationship is just getting started.

When I first started my Big Boy Job, I would quietly laugh to myself as my coworkers chained themselves to their desks and refused to eat lunch or (on a rare occasion) allowed themselves a quick 10 minutes to grab an exorbitantly priced sandwich. But I have lived the life of someone who fears coming back to an insurmountable inbox of e-mails. I watched the remainders of my sanity flicker. And, in short, I was afraid.

Case in point, today for “lunch” I had a cup of coffee and a chocolate chip cookie, stolen in a covert 5-mintue break from the computer. At 3:30 pm.

It extends even further than just the inability to escape the clutches of Microsoft Outlook. In corporate America, I have discovered that shunning food is often the proper way to say, “I am a professional,” right up there with using words like “Best,” or “Regards,” at the end of your e-mails. Take a catered board meeting for example: if there is a heaping tray of delectable treats with which you would otherwise be shoving your face if you were at home on your couch watching nine straight hours of Bravo TV, you must refrain from doing so because you are in the company of your working peers. And busy and important people never show that they love food. Nay, they scoff at baskets of mini muffins provided for working breakfasts.

Will these trends ever reverse themselves? I wonder this in sincere Culinary Carrie Bradshaw fashion. If they never do, I hereby deem this The City That Never Eats.

I have decided that being an adult is no fun because you have to pay for things you don’t want to pay for. Like prescription medication. And airfare. And socks. Wasn’t it only a few months ago that these things appeared miraculously out of thin air? I mean, I always reminded myself that I was really lucky to have my parents foot the bill on so much stuff during my formative years, but I don’t think I could have really grasped the full extent of that coup before having to hash through the specifics of my flexible spending account withholdings with the human resources lady at work.

In all honesty, though, I have always suffered from an eternal case of oh-my-gosh-I-hope-no-one-finds-out-how-young-I-am. I mean, how adult can I be if my Monday alone featured a snack break to Duane Reade for Mountain Dew and a jumbo bag of Peanut M&M’s, a double-header viewing of “Gossip Girl” (I am proud) and “Dancing with the Stars” (no, I am not proud) with my lovely roommate, and two (yes, as in the majority of my day’s) meals comprised solely of Eggo waffles?

Maybe this assessment does more to prove my ever-stellar dietetic intake than the absence of this so-called adulthood, but you get the picture. Just because I have to remind myself to make dentist appointments and pay for my own dry cleaning does not mean that I have necessarily grown up.

And, in some ways, I hope I never do.

I was running a little late this past Friday, and I strolled in to find her waiting at the end of a fairly long line. We started to exchange pleasantries when, out of the corner of our eye, we saw money… lots of money… flying all around us and fluttering to the floor. I looked closer to see that someone had spilled what had to be about $1,000 in $20 bills around this tiny Starbucks on Seventh Avenue. Initially, I assumed it was a tourist who had just come from the ATM and had tripped, losing all their cash in the process. But no. It was a crazy woman. Who had done this on purpose. She was dancing in the corner with her iPod and kept saying, “I just wanted to do something crazy.” She was giving the money away.

By the time I realized what was going on, most of the people around us had already scooped all of the bills. I made out with $60 and Anna made away with $180, but I’m pretty sure there were people that got a few hundred bucks  out of the situation. I’m still kicking myself for not being a greedy monster and hording as much as I could handle.

All of this, mind you, on top of the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Friday Morning Score.