Archive for the 'encounters' Category

smorgasbord, pt. 2

6 September 2008

just a few small tidbits today, guys… and why do i feel the need to share with you a handful of insignificant details about my past few days? i’m glad you asked!

tidbit #1. este is assisting all day.
but not just assisting. assisting at a TOP SECRET wedding in the city! so top secret, even i don’t know anything about it. crazy, right? we’ll see if he sneaks some pictures and lets me post them here. probs not, though, so don’t get your hopes up.

2. i found this site:
best of craigslist. i’m not saying it IS the funniest thing ever… but it’s pretty damn close. my personal fave so far is “to the perv who groped me on my way home”.

3. i saw two weird and unrelated things on thursday, and then one more yesterday.
thursday:

now this may not seem unusual to everyone, but to me it kind of was! for whatever reason, i decided to go off my normal beaten path to work that morning, and ended up walking west on 74th st (usually i take 76th… crazy, right?). well i’m walking between central park west and columbus ave, when i notice these columns on several buildings! seriously, there were at least five. the picture above is actually of a small school, though, which kind of cracked me up more. it’s like… yeah guys, we get it, you live on the upper west side. you’re very fancy, and clearly deserve some g-damn COLUMNS on your buildings. it’s like they needed to remind me that all i have are lowly iron fence things. whatevs.

so anyway, when i was leaving work, i decided to go for a little stroll because it was nice out and it’s good to exercise and blah blah blah. so i decide to walk to rockefeller center because then i could take the F home from there and it’s a pretty easy walk. OR SO I THOUGHT.

i had been hearing about some crazy usher/keith urban/nfl kickoff thing in columbus circle (which was on my route to the rock, as i like to call it) like all day on npr, but for some reason, it didn’t occur to me that this wouldn’t be a public event! so i start my walk, and when i get to within ten blocks of cc i start hearing usher. five blocks later, everything is blocked off! everything. so long story short, i had to go through the damn park to get home. now the park is lovely, but the paths are windy and i basically have no knowledge whatsoever of where any of them lead to, so i was kind of annoyed. and there were cops EV-ERY-WHERE. so i was kind of pleased when i finally found their stomping ground for this event:

for those of you who have read the trog before (like, way before), you may remember some images and mention of groups of cops near my old place in brooklyn, and how they all hung out under the bridge. so i was surprisingly comfortable with seeing like 75 of them milling around in one area. and that awesome little segue way brings me to…

friday:
more cops! i don’t have a picture of this one because i didn’t want people to get mad, but it was weird all over again. i decided to do a different stroll home yesterday because the first one was such a disaster, so i’m walking down our street, and i pass the police station that’s on the corner on the opposite side of our block. there are usually a couple of cops milling around talking to neighbors and homeless people and stuff, but there were so many of them out yesterday, that i took notice. as i started getting closer to our place, i saw a kind of big group of people on our corner, absolutely surrounded by cops, and fenced in to the sidewalk by those weird corral things they use for events and stuff.

i happened to have just passed a cop, so i turned around to ask him what was up, and he told me it was “police protest slash concert”. excuse me? “i dunno, the east village is so weird.” i later found out that a group of faux punk kids were protesting, on the large scale, a new police precinct, but more specifically, some kid getting shot by an off-duty cop. awesome.

4. prison break is back.
thank god.

wow, this is way more interesting.

13 August 2008

so i’m sitting here at the blog command station, minding my own business, and reading abby’s new blog, when i hear absolute screaming coming from the street. screaming. this one guy is ripping the other guy a new one about not having his back, and how’s he supposed to know he has his head on straight and whatnot?

there are two reasons this freaked me out: 1. there’s a police station on our block, which makes it super quiet over here, and the content of the the yelling made it seem like these guys just had a failed rite-aid robbery; and 2. when i went to the window to spy on them, they looked like they were actually on their way to a rite-aid robbery.

but guess what! they’re actors!

not real actors, but the kind that nyu kids hire to star in their college films. apparently they do that a lot over here.

sigh…

30 June 2008

things i wish i had my camera for today:
- santa claus, 76th and broadway
- tractor pulling 6 foot spool of cable wire, J platform at delancey/essex

newyork.craigslist.org/personals/missedconnections

5 May 2008

just kidding, not really. but on the serious, something funny and kind of weird happened today. i had two interviews; one in tribeca, and the second on the upper west side. so i spaced them out a little to make sure i had time to get to each, which naturally ended up with me getting to the uws an hour and a half early for the second one. of course.

it was a such a lovely day out that i figured i would sit inside a starbucks for the duration of my wait, since there were about seven in the surrounding area. i get my chai and get situated at the counter at the front window, and no more than three minutes later, an older gentleman sits next to me.

this guy goes on to – with each sip – slurp his coffee and then give a little sigh of satisfaction. gross. and annoying. but i sit there, trying to ignore him, until he leaves about fifteen minutes later. oh, and he was wearing a straw hat. so anyway i leave the starbucks about 45 minutes later and go sit on a bench outside to make a phone call. i FINALLY only had like twenty minutes until the interview, so i went back to the starbucks real quick to use the ladies’ room.

as i am exiting the bathroom, who comes walking towards me to use it? straw-hat-slurping-guy! weird, right?

yes, that’s it. i just felt like sharing. :)