Dear Wigleaf— We are at it again. I find myself in goose down, in another cold city, with a sack of wet clothes from hot yoga and we ignore the man on the street looking for change, holding out his Dunkin Donuts styro, but lament the life of the deer now stuffed and mounted in a storefront window on the same block. We marvel our privilege of octopus over cows. Stuffed deer over hungry people. Ducks on the pond over the goose feathers lining our coats. Andy yet we feel so clean from the yoga, you understand? For an hour, we studied German line drawings, then ate food-truck hot dogs in the bright afternoon, looking for police officers not doing their jobs (as the headlines claim), for protesters staging die-ins. But all we see are clusters of people walking past storefronts that sell resolution fitness clothes and identical colorful down coats. The deer in the window is draped with leather gloves. Rhinestone baubles dangle from its antlers. The trains pause from their subterranean roar as we surface from it and cross the plaza, past a statue celebrating Gandhi. And one of us loses a hat on the way to tea. And one of us needs a new pair of shoes. And so we buy the shoes but skip the hat—that's why coats have hoods, we say!—and we sip watery chai on a second floor vegan restaurant off Broadway and watch the city move by, talking in circles about contradictions, as though we are all trapped in a film in which everything and nothing happens. EPL 12.30.14 Manhattan 
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