28 Jan 07

Time:

?

Money:

?

More interesting things:

Rode down to meet Roey, Rebecca, and Rebecca's friend Jessica for brunch at Tio Pepe's, which was great, but I also really enjoyed the train trip itself: as I was sort of lost in a combination of "New York State of Mind" on my iPod and visions of myself as a dissertation-writing city firefighter, four live firefighters hopped on, somewhere between 51st and West Fourth. They were volunteer guys from other towns, but still - it was a sudden, pleasantly weird concrete representation of what I'd been thinking about.

Saw, since my headphones precluded listening to, a fairly lengthy conversation between what would, in another place, be an unlikely pair - two genders, two races, two ages, two purposes (one headed to work, I think as a nurse, the other, based on his rolling luggage, to the airport), two socioeconomic classes (I'd bet, anyway), but sitting on one bench in one car in one city, which I guess was the important part here.

Rescued someone's bankcard, kind of. Roey and I hit the Washington Mutual before getting on our way to the library, and he noticed a card and a receipt sticking out of one of the ATMs. I thought maybe the owner had run out of money and was too frustrated to bother taking them, but the record showed over 15 grand in the account, so that clearly wasn't the problem. This left us with the feeling that we needed to do something, but there was no place to, like, drop the card; Roey was in the midst of suggesting calling whatever number might be on the back of it when one young woman led through the door another who was spilling over with relief and "thank you's." She seemed like another student - her bag had a Harvard patch on it - and she was clearly as happy as I would have been to get something like that back. She took the card and took off, leaving us smiling in her wake, especially when the girl who'd gone to catch the owner told us that if she had "been up longer" she would have explained that she had seen who it was and would try to find her before she got too far; instead, she explained, all she could do was think, "Must... find... girl!"

Spent several hours at the library and, consequently, got the vast majority of the week's work done. Awesome.