Anyone who speaks unfavorably of NYC is… lifeless.

That may seem a bit harsh, but I hope you agree by the end of this post. You see, life can very easily become one mundane blur of beige. The problem with beige is people generally don’t hate it, so it ends up painting more than just the walls of living rooms. It ends up in our wardrobes (figuratively and literally), diets (hopefully only figuratively), jobs, relationships; it ends up permeating everything.

How do beige and NYC relate? Unfortunately there is a lot of beige in NYC. Go to any tourist area and you’ll see it all around. People travel around the world to visit and where do they end up? In bigger versions of the same places they frequent at home. Safety. Familiarity. Did you really expect to find wonder at Gap and TGI Friday’s?

But NYC has a lot that is vibrant, too.

One afternoon, three years ago, I was on a business trip in NY and decided to get lost in the city. I hopped on Yelp, looked up the best places in NY to get cupcakes, plotted a course that took me to three of them, and set out. Several hours later I had the sugary evidence to prove that I’d explored the city: a quarter-sized dollop of chocolate buttercream proudly displayed on my (literally) beige jacket. At the third bakery a rather handsome twenty-something took the opportunity to flirt with me while pointing out that I was a wreck. A year later my friends were asking why I disgustingly hadn’t washed the stain out, but I left it as a reminder to not get stuck in a rut.

So while I could recount my journey in diary form, I’ll save you the boredom. You’ll learn nothing from my stories of magic in bars, walking through Central Park until I had blisters on my heels, running into Zachary Quinto, or deliciously stumbling upon some of the tastiest Asian food I’ve ever had. If there is one thing I wish to share with you from a week in NY, it is purple gingham.

In other words: don’t live beige. When life is an adventure, you’ll always have a response when you are asked “what have you been up to lately?”