last night i was a little drunk, which is nothing particularly new, and did the train ride home to queens at about 1:30. at that time, the train's pretty populated, with a good, manageable crowd of people transferring to the N at times square. it's the only crowd i particularly like, because it's early enough not to be completely depraved, but late enough that there doesn't seem to be anyone who was just staying late to work. like, we're all bad, but in a loveable way.

at 49th, which is the station with the bright red bricks, there was a girl who did a long good-bye right at the door, with one leg in, wanting to get in all her "i'll see you tomorrow"s before she had to get on and get whisked away.

i was sitting in a sideways seat, so i could look out the window, and she sat at the forward-facing seat right in front of me. she was pretty and had red hair and a knee-length light brown leather jacket, with a black hood out over the collar.

on her ride, she spent most of the time looking at the ceiling and smiling. her eyes were looking around up there like she was thinking about things, and she just smiled and smiled. her cell phone was in her hand, and she fidgeted with it the whole time, and twice she opened it up and scrolled through something to read it, and then shut it and went back to smiling at the ceiling. on her left hand, she kept running the side of her thumb around and around in a circle over the cuticle of her index finger. and she touched the tips of her boots together, and then set her feet straight again, and did that a couple times.

she had a nice night. i liked the fact that i could watch her so obviously, because she was oblivious to me. a woman who's happy is almost always beautiful.

i got off at 30th avenue and got a dunkin donuts coffee. she went on from there. i don't know her, but i hope she stays that happy.

there's a website called overheard in new york, and it's fun to read, and its name pretty much explains it. after you read it for a while, you realize that part of its appeal is the editing. whoever filters the quotes and puts them together keeps them snappy.

most of them are funny--they're all of a type. my favorite thing to do, without a doubt, is to overhear things that strangers say, but i tend to like the stuff that is more wistful. like, less ha-ha funny, and more aw, that's interesting. regardless, i really wish i had something to send this website.

the best amusing, new-yorkish thing i've heard does not lend itself to the terse format of overheard in new york. but i can put it here, right? so there's this guy roller blading with his little girl. he's all smiles and having a good time. this is happening in a small sidewalk square full of benches, and it's sunny, so there are a lot of people. the guy jumps up and tries to roller-blade across an empty bench, but slips and falls on the ground. he doesn't seem so much to mind, because he's having fun.

there's a lady sitting by me, and she says this: bravo. asshole.

the beauty, the sheer genius of her utterance, lies completely in the timing. the sort of smart-ass but friendly nonetheless "bravo," followed by a short interval and "asshole." what was wrong with her? who knows. what did she look like? exactly like you think.

astoria baptist church

took a walk around the neighborhood last night. i like it when baptist churches do not have soaring stained glass windows. i also like crosses that do double-duty as security lights.

this high school reminds me of the hospital where oliver sacks worked in awakenings. i'm a fan of windows. i want to see him throw one open and awkwardly ask a nurse out on a date. that would be nice to see.


a high school for the performing arts, if its sign is telling the truth

best thing i said today: i saw john walk into the building lobby, and he had on a tee-shirt of the turkish flag.



really loud, across untold number of strangers, i yelled, "john you turkey!"

the turkish guy who takes care of the vending machines pulled up next to me. "is he turkish?" he said.

this test about american english dialects was on bluishorange this morning. taking the test was fun--it's obviously not anything sophisticated, but i was sort of amazed by my result anyway:

50% general american english
30% dixie
15% upper midwestern
5% yankee

this accurately captures the fact that i grew up in the south, raised by transplanted midwestern parents. i say y'all regularly, i call pretty much everything a coke, and pen and pin sound the same when i say them. believe it or not, when it rains while the sun is shining i say the devil is beating his wife, and yes, everybody listening takes one step away from me. that does sound like something a lunatic would say, doesn't it? maybe that's why i say it. but then i have things i picked up from my mother, like saying "catty-corner," which i say even though i really have no idea what it exactly means. and i think midwestern people say that.

but you can't talk about the southern dialect without talking about your accent, and that's much more interesting. your accent shows up every time you open your mouth, no matter what you say. if you heard me talk right now, you would probably describe my accent as pretty flat. i didn't do anything to make it that way--that's just how it ended up.

a few years ago, mia and i dropped in on jay in tennessee, a friend of mine from high school. he cooked us dinner, and we sat around and played with his kids. as the night wore on, jay said, "hey, you want to see a video tape of josh and me in high school?" he puts this thing on, and the very first time 17-year-old josh opens his mouth i think oh my god, my accent is thick. mia goes, "wow, nice accent," as if it caught her off guard. seeing that tape was a funny experience for me. like, how weird can you sound to yourself?

but i can prove it's all relative. during the time when that video tape was made, people would make fun of me all the time because i talked "like a yankee." my parents were midwestern, remember, so i guess i sort of sounded like them. but then i turned 18 and moved to cleveland, and i would say, "do you want to go outside?" and people would mock me back to myself, "dyo y'alls wunt t go ow-at syiiide?"

by the way, those people were fuckers. in case you wondered.

so, rest assured, no matter what the hell you sound like, i bet someone somewhere thinks you talk funny. and it's good that way. just like the test--i wonder if it's possible to come up as 100% general american english, and nothing else. if you can do it, i'll buy you a beer.

why am i still at home? i should be at work. at home, why am i? at work i should be. why the hell am i still at home? goddam, i should be at work.

the flatiron building with shit on it

maybe they really will project billboards onto the moon. photo courtesy of mia, as is often the case.

there's a guy who works in my lab. let's call him bob. "bob" is a perfect name for him, because actually that is his real-life name. so let's call him bob. let's call me josh, because that's my name, and let's always use real names, because my brain isn't big enough to handle two names for everyone. but i am digressing.

bob is in his seventies. he's got steel-wool type hair, and a white goatee, and his glasses are so thick that it makes his eyes look small. a representative quote from bob would be, "what the fuck is wrong with this thing?" i really like him.

yesterday i saw bob walking down broadway, as i sometimes do, and i yelled out hey bob! we were just passing each other crossing the street, and he said, "josh, hi!" and he held out his hand and we just sort of touched hands for a second and kept walking, which seems like a standard hip young guy type greeting, but it was extra cool because it was bob, and bob's like seventy-something.

here in our lab, bob fits in perfectly. he's retired from working at ibm, and now he's doing a visiting-scientist thing here with us. even though we're all 20-something or 30-something (i have to include that one just for myself), he never pulls an old-scientist act on us, and he bitches about everything just like everyone else does. there's a lot of youth to him. as perhaps there is to a lot of seventy-something people.

being here has taught me that i do not want the life of a professor. in fact, i can't imagine why anyone would want that. but an academic environment does mean one thing--you will always be around young people, and you will always have the chance to appear young. even if you're old. perhaps when i'm not young anymore, that will be important to me. but who knows. when i'm seventy, if i'm seventy, will some 30-year-old dude ever think to write about me because i seem to have defied my age? could i do so well?

yes, another explosive segment of josh's life. please remember that, as usual and required by contract, josh's life has been run through a fiberglass filter and washed with acetone, to assure appropriateness for the consumption of america. yes, america, how are you? oh good, me too.

what will josh talk about today? as you may recall, we have two options:

1) what happened on public transportation today, and

2) what live music did josh buy a ticket to go see, and did he stand up front and pay attention, and did he mouth all the words quietly to himself to avoid disturbing others around him?

public transportation? how lame would that be? no, today we're going to talk about music. dude, i so totally bought tickets for us to see fiery furnaces at bowery ballroom like a month or two ago. so they change the show to webster hall, to accomodate a larger crowd, and i'm like, it's all good, holmes, whatever you say. so the ticket says DOORS 9:00PM, and i'm like, way before my bedtime, no worries, i'm gonna be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed.

and so i get everyone together, make all these plans, and we get there at ten. there is this total line of skeezy guys in two-hundred dollar lightly-pre-destructed jeans and shiny shoes and shiny shirts. you know, guys with, like, haircuts. um, so totally not fiery furnaces material, but maybe i am mis-judging my peergroup. we ask, hey dude, whatchu guys waiting in line for? they say, the playgirl's night out singles auction. oh, um. kay then.

the doors for the fiery furnaces was at 6:00. that's way before my bedtime. in fact, that might be so far before my bedtime that it's during my bedtime. we go upstairs, and get to see about twenty minutes. and i loved it, but it's really hard to pay attention and enjoy it when you know you did something so stupid. so hey. then we went and got drunk. there was no fiery furnaces on the bar jukebox, in case you wondered.

the moral: when they change the venue, check the new time, baby.

on the bus tonight, there was a young guy sitting by himself in one of the single seats. he had his bag in his lap and headphones on. at some point down 125th, he took a blank piece of cardboard out of his bag, and upon it he sketched the outline of a message in block letters. the message completely filled the space. what it said, was this:

HOTTEST
CHICK
EVER
he then used a sharpie to carefully adjust the shapes of the letters. one could see that the curve in the R was given special attention.

his bag had one of those webbing things in the flap, from which he produced his art supplies. he colored in the letters for a while, and then put the sharpie away, pulling out a bigger pen, which looked to me like a dry-erase marker. with added vigor, he returned to his work.

when we went over the triboro bridge, he finished, and put it away. i was hoping to see who he was going to show it to. i don't think you would ever show a sign that said hottest chick ever in huge letters to the hottest chick ever. but other than that, i am still confused about the possibilities.

this week my favorite radio station, kexp seattle, has been broadcasting from manhattan at the museum of television and radio. we skipped out on work today and went to see two bands play live in the studio--kristin hersh and matt pond pa. i don't know exactly why they do a week in new york city every year, but hey i'm not complaining.

it makes me feel all cultured and snotty that my favorite radio station is in a city i don't live in. and they play cultured and snotty indie rock. nya nya.

irony lives on. the terrists have not won.

i am wondering about the people who make awnings. do you think they have a policy--no matter what semi-retarded shit you send them on the form, they print it exactly how you write it?

flat's fixed! ...or
vegetables "fruit" lotto coldcut 1010-news ...or
all prices start at ¢.99!! ...or
open 24 hour

or perhaps, well, they are illiterate, too? an awning seems pretty big to fuck it up so hard. but it seems to happen more often than not.

actually, the open 24 hour i saw was a big pink neon sign. that's even worse, right? some poor son of a bitch was bending glass around in broken english.

this morning i was talking to mia, and i mentioned getting my morning coffee at panino, the place on the corner by work. she said she thought i always went to the coffee cart in the mornings.

i said that i do, but the guy there knows my order, so it's in the bag waiting for me from halfway down the block. so, say, if i don't want a large coffee with no sugar and a vanilla doughnut, then there are problems, and i have to make this whole big thing, and he takes it all out and apologizes, as if he did something wrong. so if i just want a medium coffee, i have to go someplace else.

for a while i thought about changing my order around, so he wouldn't know what i wanted, and then he'd always have to ask. but then he wouldn't know my order, and i might get my feelings hurt.

life is so complicated.