30 Sep 06

Time:

?

Money:

$0, because I don't hit the ATM again until tomorrow morning.

More interesting things:

Took the train downtown so I could go to the gym, and watched a lady interact with a little boy in his stroller. The boy dropped his toy, a plastic Transformer-ish figure with appendages that looked kind of like crab claws. The lady picked it up, figured out how to work the claws, and gently moved toward the kid, doing the claws as she got closer. The boy would pull his hand back and laugh, and they'd start again. The thing is, the mother was sitting behind the stroller watching - this was just a random, mom-like lady who finished the exchange by handing the toy back to the kid and saying, "Here, Papi."

Changed from Erin Brockovich to CNN for a minute while I was on the treadmill so I could hear a segment about the first female Thunderbird pilot. The piece was great - the major seemed very cool, obviously loved her place as a role model, the whole thing - and then they get back to the studio and start making all these comments about how she's so SWEET! Now, don't get me wrong - she was clearly a very nice, friendly person. But would they go out of their way to call a pleasant male Thunderbird "sweet," for chrissakes? I think not. Retch. (And not that this has much to do with daily life in New York. But, then again, if I'd had perfect eyesight I might have been trying for her position right about now instead of doing what I'm doing.)

Sat across the train from another mom. This one sat with her two girls, a young-ish teenager and maybe a fifth-grader, holding art supplies and a Borders bag. The girls were coloring in these nifty Crayola things with black pages and a marker that turned the pages from black to multi-colored, drawing happy little landscapes - rolling hills and a sunrise, not exactly local stuff - and name placards for their room. Fifth-Grader asked Mom for a mint, got one, and said, "Thank you, mother DEARest," in the same way I might even now - and, come to think of it, she had on glasses and a ponytail, too. Then Teenager put her coloring away and rested her head on Mom's shoulder, while Fifth-Grader asked about Daddy. Certainly, I have no real idea of what their lives are like, but I got a tiny peek today, and it was enough to make a good reminder that it's pretty dumb to assume things about families just because they get off somewhere north of 96th Street.

Listened, for just two seconds as I rushed out of my station, to the 68th Street cellist from yesterday.

Hopped off the train and headed toward the stairs, passing a lady with a big closed-up cardboard box marked... North Shore Animal League. I worried for a second that maybe the cat was going BACK there, but then I realized she was on the uptown side, and that's the wrong direction if you need the LIRR, so Tiger returns.

Passed the significantly fancier vegetable market on the east side of the avenue on my way home. First of all, there are pumpkins, which is excellent, but there were also bunches of asparagus, gathered together by lavender rubber bands and lined up standing on their root ends (does asparagus come from roots?) All in a row, they looked like a short green picket fence, chest height on the produce rack.

Heard, for the second time in two days, someone shrieking "Taxi! TAXI! TAAXXXXIIII!" without even bothering to get a little bit in the street. If I were a cabbie, I would ignore these people just because they're annoying, and how effective is it to yell for someone whose windows, in many cases, are closed anyway? Lucky for this lady today, I guess, the one that happened to be going by at the moment heard her and pulled over, but come on now. Let's do this like people who didn't learn about it from reading a description in a book.