The nose knows...

Okay... this is terrible.

After work today, I had to go shopping, I needed new slacks for work. As a result, of course, I caught a later train. As I sat down, I noticed across from me was an older man who had a bandage across the middle of his face. He had this bandage there because he had no nose. None. At the bottom of the bandage the holes where his nostrils were. Pretty gruesome, and unfortunate for the guy. Even better, I swear, these are my ACTUAL THOUGHTS:

Wow, that stinks.

Not that he can tell!

I am the best ever.

Learning Spanish...

I've been spending the last week working out like crazy (two times a day, plus taking the stairs eight flights at work), and radically reducing my food intake, both in volume and calories. I've been getting up at twenty after five to work out before getting ready for work, and then going for a run when I've getting home.
This is all stuff that's good for me, of course, and I'm glad I'm doing it, but man, have I been irritable this past week. I'm just getting frustrated and antsy at work every day, which is not something that usually happens. I imagine it'll be like this for another week or two, as my body adjusts to the lack of intake and the surplus of stimulation. Of course, the idea is, while not pushing myself too hard, of course, to maintain intensity of my workouts, otherwise I'm never going to keep losing weight, which is something I really need to do.
I bought a knee brace this week, as I banged my left knee at work a couple of weeks ago, and it's not healed up right away. Of course, this is something you have to get used to, as I'm three weeks away from entering the last year of my twenties. That combined with the daily stress I put on my knees, it's no wonder it taken some time to get better. In the meantime, I run like one leg is now robotic, which is kind of cool in a little kid sort of way.

My friend Dan decided that he wouldn't cut his hair this year, at least until we go to Disney in a month or so. After getting a haircut in late January, I at first inadvertantly, the deliberately, have been following in his footsteps. I never had really long hair, like rocker or hillbilly long, but my hair used to be kind of longish back in high school and early college, and then has been kind of shorter as I've gotten older, and there's been less of it. Maybe this is a last hurrah for this kind of thing, or maybe this is a way to try and get in touch with my past, which is something, for the first time in my life, really, I'm kind of jealous of. I'm not exactly sure, but I'm guessing it's more of the latter.

Well, this is about to get really depressing here on my end, so I'm going to wrap this one up. I've been trying to write more in this blog, just to get in the habit of writing more often. I figured, hey, if I'm trying to eat better, and get in shape, I may as well work on improving other aspects of my life, right? Now I just have to move on learning Spanish.

A quick one!

I am not a thin man, not any more, and I haven't been for many years. Yet there are many men far fatter than I am. One of these today was on the ferry going home, I noticed him as I was getting on the boat. He was sitting down (not surprising, as he was probably around 300 pounds), and was wearing a black shirt that on the front just said "WHY?".

I thought to myself: "Probably too many donuts."

A-thank you!

A weird story...

So last Saturday, I spent the day with my girlfriend and her family, which was a great time. On the way back from my girlfriend’s sister’s house upstate, we stopped back at her parent’s house in Jersey. Just putzing around, Michelle (my gal), myself, and each of her parents are in different rooms. Michelle decides to plink about on her old piano, which she hasn’t played with in a while, and no one in the house plays it at all. So she opens the cover of the piano (the thing that covers the piano keys, I’m talking about), and from the next room I hear something spill out. I come in, and there’s dog food on the floor!

She tells me that it came out of the piano, and I ask her if she’s mistaken, if it was on top, she says no, and there’s only one way to find out. So she opens the cover, and she can’t even open it all the way, because the entire bass side of the piano is crammed full of kibble!

This is bizarre, okay? Words can’t do it justice. It’s surreal, like something out of a Dali painting or something. It’s just two things you wouldn’t expect to see juxtaposed.

So Michelle calls her mother in, because frankly, the first thing we think is that someone did this on purpose. She of course expresses shock. Michelle asks her if they should ask her father, and her mother says that she thinks they have to.

Michelle’s father comes in, and he’s the person who actually figures out what happened, in that a mouse was taking the dog food, and storing it in the piano.

Just an odd story, really, but I think that image of dog food packed in between the black keys of a piano will stay with me long after I forget the particulars of this story.

You know what I hate?

You know what I hate? Really, really hate with a burning passion? Hand cart luggage. You know, those suitcases that people have on wheels, and drag them around by a handle? Somehow, over the past couple of years, these things have become prevalent, not only among travelers in airports, but amongst commuters travelling in the city. I know where this comes from, actually, as a few years ago there was a fairly big news report on how back packs were bad for your kids, that they led to back problems, and these were marketed as an alternative. From the kids they went up to the parents, who use them instead of backpacks, shoulder bags, or briefcases. I can’t wait until a study in five or ten years reveal how bad these things are for your shoulder.

You know why I hate them? Well there’s not just one reason. Firstly, and primarily, they take up two people’s spaces in a crowd, because people drag their belongings behind them, instead of carrying them like an adult who’s not crippled. Secondly, as a corollary, in a crowd, because they’re so low, you can’t tell they’re there, so you see what you think is an empty space, attempt to move towards it , or get angry at those in front of you who do (and you know how anger on commutes builds and builds, leading to explosions on someone over the course of your week). Also, people have no idea what’s going on behind them, so these things are usually directly in your way as you attempt to walk like a normal human being. Also, it just says something about those people who use them (and if you do, I’m sorry, this is the impression I have of you) , that these people are completely self-absorbed, because they don’t realize what an unbelievable hassle these things are.

Now, I know backpacks are sometimes no great shakes either, but at least you can see them coming, and do something to get yourself out of the way, if a 10th grader with fifty books swings that thing in your face while you’re sitting on the subway.

So you know what I do when I see people with these fucking things? I kick them. Or step on the backs of them. Not hard, not to break anything inside of them, just to maybe turn them over, or cause them to skip, something to break up the rhythm of the person dragging their personal belongings behind them to save all that insane stress on their back or shoulders, and let them know, if just for a second, the annoyance I deal with every day.

Man, I hate those fuckers.

I'm back, baby!

The Hour with The Power!

I’m getting a visual migraine. Pretty sure these are psycho-somatic, something I heard Michelle got, and so now I get them too when the situation arises. Either way, it’s getting hard to see. I can still write though. That’s good.

Last week (ye gods, has it been over a week already?), coming home from a Mets game, I got to the new South Ferry train station and observed the new escalators. They’re impressive, in a low-key sort of way. Until someone goes to use them, they run at a very slow pace, saving energy. Then when someone walks up, they increase speed to draw the person or people up the stairs. There’s a metaphor in there. Maybe a song.

*******

Last Tuesday night, I got together with a few of my friends and played a game, a drinking game. A Power Hour to be exact. This is, for those who don’t know, when you drink a shot of beer every minute on the minute, for an hour straight. If my math is correct, you end up drinking seven and a half cans of beer in an hour, getting you quite drunk. That, of course, is the whole purpose of the game. It certainly worked, but that’s not what this is about. This is about doing it on a Tuesday night.

On the surface, and pretty much every level below, this seems like a bad idea. I had gotten up pretty early for work that morning, and would be doing the same on Wednesday. On this particular week, I had quite a lot to do at work to boot, so the ability to focus would be useful. Besides, drinking on the weeknights is something I generally try to avoid, as I worry it will lead to just drinking all the time, something I feel I may be in danger of doing. Plus, if this was just a one-off desire to cut loose and get wasted, why? Was there something wrong, something stressing me out that drove me to want to do this so much I had to convince my friends to do it with me1?

I think, and I emphasize “think” because I feel I know myself far worse than I used to, that I wanted to do this so much to prove a point. You see, sure I’m 28 years old, sure I’m holding down a real job-type job, sure I pay rent. But you know what? That rent’s baby rent, I live with my folks, all the separate entrance in the world doesn’t change that. I’m not married, I don’t have kids. I don’t have pets. I don’t have a house, or a car, or a cell phone. I don’t even have a credit card. All I have is my rent and my student loans. If I lost my job tomorrow, while it would obviously suck huge, I’m not in a position where my life would spiral out of control. There is no reason for me not to cut loose, except life, or societal pressure, tells me not too.

You see, at 28, people have real substantial lives. Families. Responsibilities. Some of my friends have them. I think I got carried along in that. I get older, and think that I have to act or behave in a certain way, a way befitting my age, because that’s what everyone else is doing.

The retort I hear ringing in my head already2 is that this was just some desperate salvo in the face of growing up, then. That I should stop trying to live in the past and at least act like I’m an adult.

I am an adult. I don’t have to act like it, it’s just what I am. What I’m getting at is that the other stuff is an act. All that baggage, the burden of responsibility, the pressures of work, that’s the act. And it’s not a simple act either. It’s like I’m one of those South American frogs they talk about in Jurassic Park. The ones who start acting like females, then moving like females, then pretend to be females, then they actually become females. All that responsibility, all that worry, all that keep-treading-water attitude that we all take on hardens, it calcifies around you and then it’s what you actually are. That’s what I was fighting against last Tuesday.

So… here’s to drinking games on Tuesdays. To staying up ‘til 2am playing video games. To doing whatever it is you do – You know what? This is too hokey, even for me. That’s why I wanted to drink last Tuesday though.

The writing got rid of the migraine. Huh.

1. They’re glad they did!
2. Whenever I debate with myself, I always picture people I know (or knew) talking to me, never my own voice.

Some purely superficial observations (fa-fa-fa, fa, fa-fa fa-fa fa)

I was told recently that I tend to notice a lot of superficial things about people, and feel free to talk about them. I tend to disagree, actually, I just tend to notice a lot of things about people, and some of them, people feel are superficial. Others, people feel I’m just conjecturing, as there’s no way I could know those things. Of course, there is no way I could know some things about people; there’s no way to really know how someone is feeling, or what they’re thinking, unless you’re them. But believe it or not, I don’t like getting into semantic arguments with people1, so if I look at someone, or hear someone say something, and say aloud that that person is happy, or sad, or whatever, and then someone counters with “there’s no way you could possibly know that,” I simply agree that there isn’t, and let it drop.
Somewhere along the way a lot of the people I know are incapable of having conversations about things where the people in the conversation have different opinions. Either they start fighting with you, think you are fighting with them, or if a third party, confuse the whole thing with fighting. As a result, I feel sometimes conversation stagnate, as you can only talk about things you both agree on, or have conversations where one person asks questions of another. It’s odd, and I feel it’s hurt my own conversational skills, which I used to pride myself on.2
Anyways, as I kind of got off on a tangent there, over the past couple of days I’ve noticed people on my commute, people who, for different reasons, I felt were interesting, at least to me. So here’s what I’ve noticed about them, starting in reverse chronological order, with this morning:

There’s a girl who, both yesterday and today, is sitting outside on the ferry. She’s the only one out there, as it’s really too cold to be sitting out there, and windy besides (especially on the boat). But you know what? This weekend it was 70 degrees. It’s spring, winter is over, and she’s sitting outside. Even if she freezes her buns off.

Yesterday, I’m getting out of the subway station at work, about to go in and start my day. I see an enormously fat man carrying a number of shopping bags, lumbering his way across the street, having some difficulty. He is grotesquely fat, almost unbelievably so. I’m not a good judge of weight, but I’d guess he was somewhere in-between four and five hundred pounds, and he was shorter than me. I consider seeing if he needs help but, a) I’m on my way to work, b) people who don’t need help doing an annoying task usually get bothered when people offer help, and c) I figured he could honestly use the exercise.

On the train ride in that morning, I’m sitting across from an older lady, perhaps mid-to-late 40’s, not particularly attractive. She starts putting on makeup.
Two seats down from her is a pre-teen girl being accompanied to school by her guardian. This is not the person who usually brings her to school, the person who usually brings her to school is a rather loud homosexual man, who is way too young to be her father. I assume, due to a family resemblance, that this man is either her older brother, or a young uncle. Either way, he seems to be the one taking care of the girl. I assume that the person travelling with the girl today, a huge hulking, bearded, hairy man, who reminds me a bit of Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, is the partner of the usual guardian, as the man also seems to have a pseudo-parental relationship with the girl, without being old enough to be a parent. I also know this girl goes to school on 12th street. It’s the kind of knowledge you pick up from commuting with the same people every day, nevertheless, I wish I didn’t know it, it seems almost…too intimate a fact for me to know.
They get off at 14th street, along with many other people. The older lady across the way becomes visible for the first time in about ten minutes, and the change the makeup makes is remarkable. She looks about ten years younger, and much less unattractive. The concept of makeup amazes me.

On the way home from work, on the ferry, Joe and I see a group of urban youth, cutting loose and having fun. These youth, from all visual cues, appear to have stepped out of 1991 or so. One of them has a high, Kid and Play-esque flattop, another has an equally high flat-top, with a fade on the sides, plus the flattop comes down in steps, and there are various shapes and patterns carved into his hair. One has Dwayne Wayne flip-shades/glasses, another is dressed like Mushmouth from Fat Albert. I watch for any sign that this is some kind of façade, and see none. I seriously consider following them for a bit, just to see what they’re doing, but unfortunately, I have plans. Also, that would just be creepy of me.

Monday morning, on the train platform on Staten Island, waiting to go to the city, a girl stands near me that doesn’t usually take the train. She is tall, taller than me (at least with her shoes on), and wrapped up tight against the elements that really aren’t bothering anyone else. She’s wearing big tinted sunglasses, and has huge lips that stand out on her general WASP-y appearance. Have you heard of bee-stung lips? These are well beyond that. She looks like she got punched in the mouth, that’s how swollen these things are. I wonder, did she get punched? She’s wearing big sunglasses, perhaps that’s to hide a black eye. Of course, she looks perfectly serene. I chalk it up to likely bad surgery, a la Goldie Hawn.

I realize that those thoughts may read odd, they certainly write that way. But I thought it’d be interesting nonetheless. So there you go.

1. At least, not anymore!
2. Oh, that post on weird things I pride myself on, when will you ever be written?!