16 Feb 07

Time:

?

Money:

$5, coffee and muffin, campus Starbucks (since I didn't go to the gym.)
$6, soda, protein bar, and a little hummus thing, my usual lunch place.
$14, round-trip Penn Station to Jamaica.
$10, round-trip Jamaica to JFK.
$40 (or so), dinner and wine, that Italian place near Rebecca's.

More interesting things:

Watched - and participated, almost - as a youngish guy sort of caught a very old lady and helped her slide onto the subway bench next to me. I had my headphones on, so I returned the smile she beamed at me without understanding, at first, that the youngish guy (who really probably only looked young because of his traveling companion) seemed to be her son, rather than just a nice person looking out for someone who needed help; I figured it out because from the minute he was able to sit down next to her until I got off the train, they engaged in the nicest, most earnest discussion I think I've ever seen between two people so apparently different from each other as they.

Walked down Washington Square East en route to the library (I needed to return The Bat-Poet, you know), past a single peanut resting lightly on a large expanse of unsullied snow just inside the park fence. What are those squirrels waiting for? (And who put it there?)

Sped down to the West Fourth Street station in my quest to get the E to the LIRR to the AirTrain... so on and so forth, but the point here is that waiting at the corner of the basketball courts near the staircase into the station was a soldier in ACU's, and as he had a duffle plunked in front of his boots, I gathered he hadn't just come from a shift at Penn Station.

Rode the LIRR, as I have mentioned a couple of times now, out to Jamaica. I was on the Babylon line, which means relatively little to me - but the perpetually weird thing is that it does not matter one speck. It is the same counting of cars, the same looking at commuters headed home to dinner, the same snorting at motorman's commentary; the same remembering, and just as important, the same remembering of remembering. The former list, on this particular trip, involved making sure that since they wouldn't "make the platform" at Jamaica I wasn't in one of the last two cars, text messaging my mom to answer her question about whether I was alone with "well, I mean there's a whole bunch of people whose dinners await them in babylon, but... :-)", and laughing out loud at the mention of keeping feet and salt on the floor where they belong; the latter meant, first, reaffirming my intent to become someday the holder of a monthly pass and, second, wondering why, when we had a very nice apartment on Carlton Avenue, a silver railroad car should seem so much like home.