a productive thursday

This past Thursday was one of my most productive days in weeks.

First, my sister Laura and I went for a 6 mile walk in the morning around the central Park Loop. Then I met up with a guy from craigslist who wanted to buy my 13" TV/VCR for $15. You see, I am trying to get rid of a lot of the junk that has piled up in this apartment over the last few years. Before I even moved in there was a ton of stuff that was just left over from the previous tenants, but during my stay, all the roommates that have come and gone have also left some belongings. So I'm trying to clean out a lot of the apartment before Maddy gets here so she'll have a clean slate to begin her decorating. Anyway, this guy met me downstairs in his car. He was Asian, but I would actually bet money he was Chinese based solely on how rude and impatient he was. It's not that all Chinese people are rude (and I'm talking about Chinese Chinese people, not Chinese Americans), it's just that if someone is Asian and they are extremely rude, chances are they are Chinese and not Korean or Japanese.

After the transaction, I met up with Greg (who had his bachelor party this past weekend). He just took the bar exam and is looking for a place in the city to move in with his soon-to-be wife, and he just happens to be checking out a place two blocks away from me, at 106 and Broadway. The apartment looked pretty awesome, very spacious, great location, and just really nice. We headed down to the Museum of Natural History to check out the frog exhibit. I used my awesome Citigroup ID to get us in for half price. The frogs were actually pretty damn cool. There were a lot of poison dart frogs that are really small and very colorful.

We walked back up town and met up with Greg's friend Tali, who just happen to be checking out apartments with her boyfriend right around the corner from me. So I figured what the hell, I'll check out what these other apartments look like and what they are going for. There were 20 people waiting at the building for the broker to show up. It was a pretty unbelievable sight to see in a few dozen people shuffle into a tiny studio apartment. The prices seemed pretty reasonable for a studio and a one-bedroom, but they just weren't all that great and the second apartment was in a pretty bad location. You can kind of tell as we all walked over to it, as a bunch of kids were playing with a fire hydrant and spraying people with water as they walked by on the opposite side of the street. Also, the broker was a huge asshole, which I guess can be expected, but that's ridiculous.

I then headed back downtown to 57th street to pick up my race number and information for the half marathon on Sunday. I was waiting for the walk signal while walking west on 57th St and I just happened to turn around and look behind me, and as luck would have it my friend Nina was standing directly behind me! I looked at her incredulously and she looked at me and said "seriously?" So we chatted up for a little while since I haven't seen her in almost a year. I gave the usual spiel about how China sucks and don't ever go and visit. She said she went skydiving. When we were sufficiently caught up, she asked me if my sister was still cleaning apartments, because her apartment desperately needed help.

Then I headed over to the Nike store to pick up my race information, and walked down to 36 and third to meet my mom and sister at Patsy's pizza restaurant. My mom was in the city because she had just made her first digital camera purchase (from B&H). She explain how she spent hours in the store, armed with several issues of consumer reports and went through each and every model of the point-and-shoot digital cameras to find the best value and one that would suit her needs. It will probably take her about a year to figure out how it all works.

Next, I continued walking downtown to meet up with my friend Pete, who I hadn't seen since before I left for China. He is a lawyer and works long hours, so we just never got a chance to meet up. But he said he recently got on a kick of mixing drinks and making up interesting cocktails and that if I came by his apartment (in the LES, which is insanely far from my apartment) he would make me a few. So I picked up some lime and mint for his concoctions and we drank and played Guitar Hero on his Xbox. Guitar hero is such a whack game - you just tap the shit out of the neck of a guitar, just like clicking a mouse at a feverish pace. So obviously it made my hand hurt. But it was kind of cool and there was a lot of good music.

Heading back was a real trip and a half. Because of construction, the uptown A/C trains were not running local past 59th St. So I usually just switched to the 1 train, but that was out of service also. So I had to get out and take the M7 bus. The whole journey was about an hour and a half.

This from my friend Jessica:

listen to this: I met this guy on the train last week, we were sitting across from each other on metro north. There was this coffee cup that kept rolling between our feet, thus began the conversation about how rude and gross people are, and how the MTA is trying to put an end to rolling food and beverage parts on the train. MTA conversations are usually long and fluid, I've taken part in many, but here's the clincher...the point: He all of the sudden says, "what's with the MTA advertisements, like the one with the cobra?" I told him about your blog, which is so fucking hilarious by the way, and he said that he was glad to know that someone else notices these things!

today on the subway I saw a few weird things.

First, this morning I saw an older man who was reading Don Quixote, which is a book I am still working on and carry around in my backpack. But later this evening I saw a woman reading the same edition of donkey of day. This is somewhat odd because usually the only books I see people reading are trashy novels, religious books, self-help books, and anything by the idiot that wrote the da Vinci code.

second, I walked into the uptown A train, sat down, and immediately a young girl in the forwardmost part of the car broke into song and started doing her thing, kind of Beyoncé. Almost immediately, in the back of the car, an older man broke into song which he introduced as an old slave song from the 1800s. it looked like the man made a lot more money because I watched him walk the length of the car and a lot of people seem to give him some change while the girl didn't make it very far.

finally, one of the more depressing things I saw was a 250 pound mother of three smacking her kids around and yelling at them about how the one kid was a follower and did everything his brother did, and why was he being such a sheet. He needs to be a leader. The father was with the family as well, except he was doing Word search puzzles and not paying much attention. It made me think this woman was really not fit to be a mother. While it is obviously too extreme to suggest anything like eugenics, I really think parents should be ticketed by police when they either verbally or physically abuse their kids in public like that. It's a very touchy issue obviously, because who's to say how she should raise her children. But these kids were probably four or five years old, and can't possibly stand up for themselves. It's sad to think this is how a lot of kids are brought up. The other terrible thing I see more often than I'd like is when really young children are riding on the subway with their mother when it is really late at night, like three or 4 a.m.

I hung out with Felissa last night. She got me an insane amount of Chinese food. Isn't she the best? Of course I had to travel about 48 hours to get down to the Murray Hill area where she lives, but it was worth. coming back home was kind of exciting. I took the crosstown bus on 34th St over to 8th Ave, and then decided to be adventurous and take a bus all the way uptown 70 blocks, rather than take the C train. sure enough, a bus actually did come. No joke, this was the fastest bus driver I have ever ridden with. The bus was an even empty, but I guess most people were looking to get very far uptown so there wasn't any need to stop at every stop. That's fine, except as bus driver was literally cutting off cars and doing around 180 miles an hour up 8th Ave. I didn't feel particularly unsafe, but I did feel pretty bad for a few people waiting at the bus stops that the bus driver in his rush to get Uptown completely messed because he was going 50 miles an hour and didn't feel like slowing down. I thought this odd, since the bus driver is really supposed to stop at the bus stops when people are waiting at the bus stops. In any event, I managed to get home in about 10 minutes, much faster than the time it would've taken me had I taken the subway. Go buses go!