HOW TO VISIT #NEW YORK

When I was a kid back somewhere near the gut of the last century, we didn't get trophies for perfect attendance. If you won, great - if you lost, shut up, don't cry and go home. If you had a birthday party, an event about as common as a total solar eclipse, you invited your friends, not the whole goddamn class.

Needless to say, we didn't have video games or cell phones so at a very early age we learned how to climb trees and how to get home on the bus.

We also learned how to cuss and spit and settle our differences with our fists and our elbows. We didn't assert our position on the social food chain with cute emoticons and cryptic abbreviations typed behind the scrim of a personal computer.

And so it was with great distress that I came face to face with the dire consequences of the contemporary condition of FOMO.

For those of you who still don't laugh out loud or who think omg is a flavor enhancer found in chop suey, fomo stands for "fear of missing out." It is an anxious state of mind brought about by the involuntary impulse to join.

We were in Manhattan recently to see the kids and the wife insisted on seeing some art exhibit by this guy from Burma who hangs taxidermied goats from cantilevered bamboo joists and gives them titles like Mandalay Bambi and Baby Hazel's Hang-up. 

Apparently the critics found the work "exquisitely executed (pun intended?) and eloquently understated". The artist was seen as "an original voice from a new generation of Southeast Asian sculptural virtuosi." One writer even described it as "the most monumental foreign visitor since the Shah." (One can only speculate whether he was referring to the 1962 or the fateful 1979 visit).

In any event, we, like so many others were bullied into believing that to miss out was to be hopelessly consigned to the intellectually unwashed and so off we went like lemmings off a bluff. 

And if that weren't enough we then had to go uptown and have lunch at this new trendy Ethiopian restaurant and wait two hungry hours to get in and eat with our fingers.

My wife ordered the beef kitfo.

I had the goat.