I Woke Up This Morning To The Cold Cold Water

I woke up this morning and found a water bug in my bathroom sink.1 Now, this was literally less than a minute after I had woken up, and my brain didn’t know quite how to process this. I looked at the bug. I blinked. Twice. I decided I would go pick out my clothes first, and deal with this shortly. I left the light on, thinking that this water bug might just scurry away for parts unknown with the light on, much like a cockroach.

As I picked out socks, I considered that the bug was at the bottom of my sink, scampering like a lunatic; if it could get out, it likely already would have. My initial feeling of revulsion was transposed with pity. I would help this bug, scoop it out of the sink with a piece of junk mail I had received yesterday and bring it outside the house, to live the remainder of its bug life the best it could. I went back to the bathroom, junk mail in hand, feeling much better.

Back in the bathroom, I looked in the sink. The bug was there, it’s twenty or thirty legs and long antennae mobbing around trying to find some kind of foothold. But this ain’t no plastic toilet! No, the white porcelain of my sink was smooth. I stick the piece of mail in the sink, so that the bug could crawl onto it. At first touch, the bug went nuts, running all over the place, segmented body rippling, legs and feelers akimbo. Pity gone, revulsion back. Still I tried a few more times, each time more half-heartedly.2 I realized that if the bug ran up the mail towards my hand, I’d likely drop the mail. Then I’d have to step on the bug, and clean up the mess…and I still didn’t have any shoes on. No good.

Now, this thing was too big to fit down the drain, but what about the over-flow drain on the inside lip of the sink? That would do fine! I decided to fill the sink with water, and the bug could just float or swim to a new life in the over-flow drain! I mean, it’s a water bug. This should be a piece of cake for it.

I turn on the faucet, and it takes about five seconds for the bug to flip out, flip over, and drown. In retrospect, I likely shouldn’t have made the water scalding hot. Now to top it off, the current, combined with the weight of the bug, has pulled it to the exact opposite side of the sink from where I wanted it to be. Seriously, a direct downward diagonal from the overflow drain. So I release the stopper and in ten seconds try again.

This, too, does not work.

I drain the sing again, grab a wad of toilet paper and grab the bug’s motionless body (what’s left of it, at least, as there are little black specks in the sink 3). I throw the remains in the toilet bowl and flush. This is, let’s face it, where we all knew the story was ending up anyways.

So there that is.

*******

A few days ago, Joe and I were walking up 32nd street, towards Madison Square Garden. As we passed a church, we saw an old Indian woman begging for money. She looked rather like Mother Teresa, only without the whole married to God thing. She was leaning against the fence of the church, cup outstretched to passerby. Why she didn’t just go in the church is beyond me. I mean, I haven’t been to church in a long time, but I’m pretty sure they’re still obliged to help people. But that’s neither here nor there.

Near the curbside, there was an old black man, on crutches, obviously crippled in his legs, also prepared to start begging for money, though perhaps for some cause. He leaned his crutches against a bus stop, hobbled across the sidewalk, and dropped some money in the old woman’s cup. I considered this to be some kind of super-charity. There should have been a flash of light!

*******

Can we agree that anyone who uses the phrase “liberal elite” in an argument sounds like an idiot?

*******

This is not the first time this has happened.

I went to the men’s room at work the other day. Someone had, well… someone had masturbated in the toilet. Now, I think everyone can say that at least once they have been aroused in a public place, even to the point where they wish they could go take care of business. But to actually do it in a place of business? Just a tad disgusting. Also, I’m sorry, it just makes using the toilet kind of gross, and sometimes, you don’t have another stall option. You never want to actually picture someone using a stall before you, now you have a crystal clear image of what that person was doing. Blecch!

My first thought was that it must have been a home health aide, but I realized that’s me being class-ist, or job-ist, or something. What, just because they don’t work in an office means they have no manners? That’s some faulty reasoning there.

No matter what, there’s a guy out there who needs to get laid, and that right soon! And also, in the interim, learn what is, and what is not proper to do in a work bathroom.

Once again, this is not the first time this has happened.

*******

I believe in omens. I believe in portents, in visions, I don’t necessarily attribute these things to some supernatural power4, but occasionally you see something, and for some reason it strikes a chord inside of you, it gives you some kind of message meant for, or understood only by, you. On the ferry earlier this week, such a thing happened to me.

It was a normal morning, I sitting across from Brendan, about to start our morning conversation of sports, comic books, and making fun of people we don’t like. Brendan was just sitting down; I had gotten to the seat first, and so had just put away my GAMES magazine, where I had been doing a crossword variant. Then the man came to sit near us.

He was older, but not old. Maybe in his mid-40’s, maybe 50, it was hard to say. He had salt and pepper hair in a messy, barely styled 5 bird’s nest surrounding a bald spot in the center. His hair was longish and high and puffy, so that from the front you couldn’t see that he was balding, there was so much hair there. I rather imagine my hair could look like that in the future.

He was pudgy as well, at least 50 pounds overweight, without being really visibly too fat. His clothes were worn as if they were uncomfortable, as if they didn’t fit properly. He carried two paperback books and the New York Times, as well as a small white bag, the kind you’d get from a deli. As he sat, I saw he was apparently in the middle of reading both books, as they were interlocked, holding each other’s ages. One book was a pulp fantasy, looking the same in style and quality as those Dragonlance books by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. The other was a non-fiction study of Jewish-American relations with the rest of American society.

He ignored the books, putting them down on the seat beside him, along with a satchel bag and the small white bag. He opened the paper and started reading the front page. Without looking, he pulled a soda from the bag, opened it, took a swig, and put it down on the floor between his legs. Still without looking, he reached into the bag and pulled out a bagel overflowing with cream cheese and wrapped in plastic-wrap. He unwrapped the bagel from the plastic, put one half back in the bag, took a big bite of the other half, and started chewing, all without unlocking his eyes from the paper. When he finished one half of the bagel, he started on the other.

I thought to myself with horror, he’s not even tasting the food, he’s just eating it because that’s what he does every morning.

The horror was not with the man himself, but was from the fact that as I watched him, I felt I was waiting a possible vision of my own future.

I saw a whole life in this brief glimpse of the man. A dead end job, one where he could not afford, nor need to wear nice clothes; a life so sedentary and routine that he ate a disgusting breakfast every day as a habit, and considered the walk up the stairs of his office good exercise; a life devoid of personal contact, where reading two books at once, and keeping informed of daily events was a desperate attempt to stimulate his mind and to distract him from just what kind of pseudo-life he was actually living. It was terrible.

Now clearly, I’m not making judgments on this man’s actual life, a man who I’ve only seen once and never met. No, I’m projecting my own fears and insecurities on him, I know that. But did that make the vision less potent? I don’t think so. It was disturbing, not to my morals or to my sensibilities, where most things disturb us, but to my core. No one wants to lead a life that impacts no one, and that’s got to be one of my biggest fears. What I saw that day just fueled that fire in me, that it would it be a fear unrealized.

1. How an elephant got in my pajamas, I’ll never know.
2. Quarter-heartedly? Eighth-heartedly?
3. Maybe it was dirty?
4. Though I don’t not attribute them to such.
5. It looked like a comb touched it briefly.

You know what really grinds my gears?

Ah Family Guy...I used to watch you.

Anyways, something about this thing that you're reading now bothers me, and here's what it is. Web logs, or blogs as they're known nowadays, are basically online journals for you to write in so everyone can see how clever you are, what you think about everyday issues, or what a miserable person you happen to be. You know what I'm saying here.
They're basically public journals, and that's the part that gets me. Because it's public, you can't really write what you may want to, on the chance that someone who might read it might get offended.
I mentioned this to my friend Brendan the other day, and he said, "Well, that's what you have a private journal for." And he's right of course, from a certain point of view, but there are thoughts that I have, that I'd like to share and get other people's opinions on in the way that this blog allows me to, but I can't. So, like I said, annoying.

Really, what's annoying about that is my dissatisfaction with myself. I argue with myself about things like this a lot, on whether I care too much about what other people think, or whether that's how you're supposed to be, and I spent a lot of my life being a egocentric prick. Most of the time, I think it's a little of both.

So I end up holding my tongue here, not because I don't want to hurt people's feelings, not even because I don't want to deal with crap, but mostly because I'm afraid of negative consequences. Is speaking my mind worth getting people I care about upset? I don't know, but I'm afraid it might be. And that's never a good thing to base a decision on.

Oh, and to be the opposite of clear, here, there's no specific issue I'm talking about here. There's been plenty of specific issues, but not one thing. I've been censoring myself since I started the darn thing.

********

In other news, White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle threw a perfect game today, which is exceedingly rare, and amazingly difficult to do. For those who don't know, a perfect game is something only a pitcher can do, where they face 27 batters over nine innings, and record 27 outs. There can be no hits, no walks, no errors by the fielders behind him. It's an amazing feat, and even more amazing in today's day and age of baseball, where relievers and pitch counts, and innings counts all come into play. It also appeared to be the kind of perfect game I really like to see, where there was plenty of good defense backing up the pitcher, making it a total team effort.
Before Mr. Buehrle's effort today, only 17 men had thrown perfect games in major league history. That's ridiculous. So congrats to him.

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!