Posts from May, 2009
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Colorful Bobbing Humanity
Sometimes, when my eyes are strained after staring at the monitor, I’ll point them outside to stare at the passersby around Union Square. Who doesn’t like to look at a little variety – the colorful, bobbing humanity out there, and the excellent impromptu entertainment it provides?
Yesterday I stood smiling out the window at a group of three men — presumably working for the City as a part of the Big Annoying Construction Project — who were in the process of installing a street lamp. They had come to the point in their project that required an assessment of plumbedness, so each of them took turns crossing his arms, looking concerned, and walking (backwards) away from the lamp unaware of anyone around him. This went on for at least five minutes: across the street (backwards), west on the plaza (backwards), and south on the plaza (backwards). I didn’t stay to find out what happened.
Just now I found one of my neighbors in the crowd out there. And whenever this happens, there’s a little magic to it, strange and special, like we’re suddenly living in a small town and not the giant apple that eats humans for lunch. Sometimes I’ll be running a midday errand and pass my super coming out of the deli. Wave and smile. Last year was the first time I’d ever plucked out a city face I wasn’t already planning to meet; I was watching the traffic on a hot, sunny day and found my next door neighbor in the crowd. A cute, tightly permed woman in her seventies, I’d never imagined her outside the walls of this building, so for her to be strolling outside was a shock.
The neighbor I spotted today was the woman with short cranberry hair who rides a little red and chrome vehicle that is both larger than a wheelchair and smaller than those large almost-cars octogenarians drive in Florida. I run into her and the vehicle almost every time I do my laundry. It emits a very upsetting beep when she’s backing up, so now my ears tend to perk up like a guard dog when I arrive at the basement, which should give me the opportunity to run in the opposite direction when I hear the offending noise, but I don’t, because that’s rude. And I’m carrying forty pounds in washables.
It’s not that I want to run away because she’s got a strange vehicle, but because she’s a chatty motherfucker. And not in a cheery way. She wants to tell you how much it sucks that the building changed the garbage policy, or that this washing machine is broken AGAIN, or that, sorry, she’s got three more loads to do in each machine before you can have them. That only happened once, and my head nearly exploded… but it felt wrong to fight with a woman sitting down.
So this evening she was speeding along outside, weaving through tourists, controlling her chair with the little Atari joystick, and dangling a lit cigarette from her left hand. And then, as she approached the red light and slowed her cart, she alighted, free of its video game controls, and stood there on the bare pavement. And I had to push my jaw back up to meet my teeth.
You can be sure that next time she occupies the laundry room for three hours, she’ll get the same earful anybody else would.
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“The Truly Anxious”
I’ve been informed that my last post here was decidedly unfunny. (oops) So here’s a stuffed elephant with no rhythm to make up for it.
And if you didn’t like that, have a dancing camel.
Also, the New York Times describes what people are doing in response to the dreaded swine:
The truly anxious confess that they are trying to avoid touching elevator buttons, library books and the knobs on bathroom sinks.
I was going around thinking myself invincible to swine fear, happily not having changed my normal behavior at all. But that IS my normal behavior. Do I still win?
Dear Truly Anxious, please don’t forget to avoid touching the bathroom door. And also learn how to subway surf, so you don’t have to touch anything there either. And start using your hips to exit the turnstile. Anything else? Um, wash your hands at least 27 times today.