Magic Jewball

And now, a PSA to tourists. And not that “ha ha, I’m making fun of you by pointing out that you walk slow or wear loud colors or unfold maps in ways that block the whole sidewalk” kind. No, this is real and sincere. Mostly because it’s begun to annoy the hell out of me. See, if you’ve been here you know we use a little thing called a Metrocard to get into the subway (and buses too, but that’s not on my agenda today). You can get them in pay-per-ride and unlimited-for-one-price formats. Say you walk into an entrance of the subway which is kinda dark and kinda empty and there are no humans selling Metrocards, just machines. And a guy who looks like he is either homeless, on drugs, just released from prison, or all three, offers to sell you a swipe of a Metrocard for a dollar (one ride is $2, unless you buy unlimited). Now, I know what you, my wise reader, would do. But what about your friends and neighbors? Why do they always say, “Sure! Thanks! What a deal!”?

After seeing this day after day, I began to ask the tourists (and they always are, seriously) why they do this. Actually, I begin by saying, “um, that’s not legal, you know?” Except for the one guy, who I swear, right in front of his kid said “Yeah, I know, mind your own fucking business,” most people are baffled. “Really?” they say. “How could this be a problem?” I don’t get this at all. How can you not know you’re doing something shady? The ride costs $2, a skeevy person offers to sell it to you for $1. How can this possibly be on the up and up?

Why should I care? Well, there are two reasons. One, I don’t like to come down to the subway after a long day at work and find it full of criminals waiting for their next mark. If people didn’t buy them, they wouldn’t be there. And second, I like you tourists, I really do, you make me look at my city a whole new way, but many times, I’m forced to put up with you. Maybe I’ve mentioned but there are a lot of you, you move slowly, and I have to wait on line behind you at Whole Foods. But I do put up with you because you bring in lots of money. This is the way the world economy works. Next month, the good people of Athens will put up with me because they want my money. It all goes round and round. But when you buy $1 rides from criminals with unlimited cards, that’s $8 (there are four of you on average) that isn’t going to the transit authority. Then there is a shortfall at the MTA. Guess who gets their fare jacked up? You guessed it, me, and all the nice people of New York who have put up with you. Er, your friends and neighbors.

Actually, I got into a whole conversation with a woman who saw me inform the last group of tourists that that was illegal (”really? will we be arrested?”) and asked me incredulously how these people could not know that this wasn’t a good idea. She wasn’t even American originally but had moved from Paris twenty years earlier. Then, as happens to any two strangers in New York who have lived there many years, we both began bemoaning the loss of mom-and-pop stores to the big chains. That’s another lesson for tourists. If you really want to fit in, say, “Remember when this was Shakespeare & Co.? Those were the days.”

Photo by PiratenBraut @ Flickr

Dear NY1,

Hey! How are you? Remember me? I’m the one who watches you faithfully because you focus on the minutiae of NY life. You talk about Christine Quinn when the other channels are having cooking segments. So naturally I turned to you this morning after being woken up at 6:45 am by a crack of thunder so loud I thought a tree had fallen from the roof through several floors and apartments above mine. I mean, well, first I went back to sleep because I don’t get up before eight, but you know, later. Due to the fact that there was three inches of rain, I was pretty sure our lame-ass transit system would have some issues, and by issues I figured nothing running. I sort of assumed that this would be the most important story in New York this morning and you’d have a list of what was running and where.

Gosh, how stupid of me! Footage of downed trees in Bay Ridge matter to as wide a swath of New Yorkers as subway issues, right? I realize that a tornado hitting Brooklyn is big news, but couldn’t that have been the second story? Couldn’t the first one be “your lifeline - not running?” Sure, we’re all satisfied with a message like “Paul Fleuranges says to stay home for a while.” That’s enough detail for me! And later, hearing Pat Kiernan say, “I keep refreshing the MTA website but it says it’s down,” well, of course I understand. Isn’t that how reporters get their news? I mean, when I turned to Channel 5 and they had an MTA spokesman on the phone talking about which lines had service changes, well, come on, they could have been refreshing the MTA website! What were they thinking?

So when I set out for the IRT and found the #1 running sporadically (when I asked the MTA lady at the station if it was running, she said, “yes, but they’re hot and crowded,” I thought, “so how is today different?”) of course I knew that because you had told me to stay home and that trees were down in Bay Ridge.

Oh, and the conductor who said there was a train directly behind the one I couldn’t get on while sweat poured down my entire body, whereas in fact another one didn’t show for 30 minutes? I know that one wasn’t your fault but I choose to blame you anyway.

You fail as bad as the MTA, NY1. The difference is, I never had any faith in them in the first place.

Sincerely,
New fan of Channel 5

This is what my commute looked like once I got on the train. Apparently, other people’s too. This is from the NY Times, Storms Snarl New York Commute.

Yesterday, I got up at 7am, which as you probably know, is just not the sort of thing I do naturally on a Sunday. But this was different! It was the NYC Triathlon and it was right here on the Upper West Side. You see, nothing happens on the UWS. Parades, the marathon, everything happens on the East Side, which I’m told is a good thing but I still feel left out. If you’re thinking that’s still not enough to make me get up at 7, you would be correct. I went because Bob was running/swimming/biking the triathlon! You remember my good friend Bob, of course. Lots of people do these charity things and I respect them but I have never really seen anyone train the way Bob has. Every day she would run for miles or swim in the Hudson (ew, I know) or bike for two hours. If I would say, “God, it’s hot, I don’t think I’m going to do my walk today,” Bob would say, “I’m running six miles today.”

So I was anxious to support Bob and, frankly, to see all that training in action. Bob actually started at 6:40 am with that fun swim in the Hudson (you don’t need shots! said the website) and then the bike ride. But I have my limits and so I decided to cheer her on at the last leg, the 72nd St. run on the way to another five miles in the park. Before I left I checked to see how Bob was doing. Pretty good! I’d better get moving. (Click to enlarge and see where Bob was when I left my apartment).

Speaking of training, Bob was part of a group called “Team in Training” whose supporters would call out every time one of the team came by and say “Go T.I.T.!” And then I would laugh. Because I’m twelve. But I have to say, it was a glorious scene. The world looks different at that hour, I can tell you. Plus it was a gorgeous day and a parade of really, really fit people kept coming by. In the marathon, most people are thin and wiry, but these folks had muscles like cartoon superheroes. And it was so peaceful. All the cars were kept away and it was just runners and, uh, athletic supporters.

Look! I’m standing right in the middle of 72nd Street. As you can see, it was runners to the left, chatty pedestrians to the right, crazy photographer lady in the middle. As far as I could tell, most of the people standing near me were tourists there to cheer on a loved one. I think this was the conversation that made me teeheehee the most:

Woman, shouting down street at her daughter: “Wait, do you want to eat here? There’s a place with bagels and stuff.”
Daughter, shouting back down street: “I want to check out Starbucks first!”
Me, thinking in my head: Better eat here, lady, you never know where you’ll find a place with bagels and stuff again in NY. And to your teenager, I’m going to hazard a guess that it’s the same stuff they have in your Starbucks at home.

Ha! Wait on, suckers.

And then, finally there was Bob. Bob looked really, really tired. I called out, “you can do it!” And by you, I meant her because, personally, I couldn’t have done it. Besides, Bob raised lots of money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. So basically, she’s already done it. But after running my own triathlon (Fairway, H&H Bagels, and Zabar’s) I went back home and checked my computer again. Bob had indeed done it. Rock on, Bob!

This one’s for you, Bob.
The Commodores - Three Times A Lady

You may have heard we had an explosion this week. I heard that too. Mostly because I wasn’t anywhere near it, although, being that Manhattan is a tiny island, that may be relatively speaking. But luckily it didn’t affect me in any way except that the subway took three times as long to arrive and four times as long to get to my destination and it seemed even longer than that because I had five people pressed against me. I’m now pregnant. Oh, I kid.

But the question has been asked of me, why the hell are there steam pipes underneath the streets, anyway? What exactly does New York need steam for? If you have heard my clanking radiator (you can even hear it over the phone sometimes) then you already know the answer to this question. But for the rest of you… well, I’ll let Lois Griffin take this one.

People think you run into celebrities all the time in NY, and I won’t lie to you, you do. It just depends on what your definition of “celebrity” is. Many years ago, many being “greater than ten,” I used to watch a cable access show each week that was on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, MNN being “home for wackadoos before websites were so easy to create.” And this woman was one freaky wackadoo. I mean, she had a lot of thoughts on her mind and she wanted to share them: about open-mindedness, about the power of myth, about loving oneself and others. If you are wondering what the fuck I was doing watching that sort of thing, I ask you to imagine all that said in the most hypnotic and soothing voice possible, like honey, at exactly the time you were trying to fall asleep at night. She was like a drug, a crazy, crazy dose of Ambien.

But then she disappeared off of MNN and ever since then I’ve been trying to find out where she went, albeit in a half-assed way. I’ve missed her long extemporaneous diatribes couched in the most earnest and sincere manner. “I’m a mystic!” she would say. “I am a healer.” And I miss the way she would go from tangent to tangent and never make it back to her original point. But that was OK because she never really had one or at least it wasn’t one that you or I could understand. All that mattered is that she lulled me into blissful sleep. She has a website but it hasn’t been updated in forever. I kind of gave up and turned to the real Ambien. Which you wouldn’t know from the time my posts tend to appear but whatever.

Anyway, I was at a local shop, a big shop, with an information desk, and I went to ask where the item I needed might be. And there she was, the MNN Wackadoo Lady. I felt like I was in a dream, the kind you have when you actually sleep at night. But she was real. Right in front of me. In the most mundane job in the universe. I did what I always do when I’m face-to-face with a famous person (yeah, yeah, she’s not Angelina Jolie, but she’s famous to me): I give them a little “I know who you are” eyebrow waggle and see if they return it with a “yep, I’m ____ !” look. She kind of did. And then I decided to just go for it and say, “Linda?” She was surprisingly unfazed that I knew who she was (I mean, did I mention? She’s not Angelina Jolie) but seemed pleased that I remembered her and that I told her I wished she were back on the air. She had a lot of reasons, “I lost my producer, these things take money, I lost my web designer, blah blah blah.”

If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned her name it’s because I told her a lot of nice, uh, less than truthful things about herself, like that she had significant things to say and added meaning to people’s lives. I don’t want her to Google herself and find that the chick who said those things actually just thought she was a nutjob with a smooth, smooth voice. But of course, if you watched MNN at a certain point in time, you may know who I’m talking about. And the truth is, she did mean a lot to me. I searched for her for years! Sometimes you just have to go to the shop down the street and ask at the information desk.

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Just Like Honey