Are you supposed to call the cops in this situation? Should I call 911 or is that overkill? Is there a better number for non-emergency, but still annoying situations? Although this sounds really cowardly, I think it’s better to just let it go. No need to make an enemy. Especially a slightly deranged enemy who clearly has time on his hands.

Ok . . . situation averted. An FDNY ambulance (I was unaware that the Fire Department had ambulances, but whatever) pulled up and shoo’d him away. Literally. They didn’t even get out of the ambulance, they just shined a light on him, and spoke to him over the radio/megaphone thing. . .”Move along, sir, you can’t stay here”. The crackhead rambled and yelled incoherently for about 5 minutes, but the paramedics didn’t move or respond.  Then the crackhead, who was obviously defeated in the case of nonsensical yammering vs. silence, rode away on a bmx bike, swerving back and forth across the street, all while giving the paramedics the finger.

Classy.

Mail Lady: “Since you don’t have your names on your mailbox, I usually just put all the mail in your neighbor’s box.”

Me: “There’s a large number 1 on our mailbox, why don’t you put all the mail marked ‘Apt. 1′ in our mailbox”.

Mail Lady: “It’s not my job to sort the mail”.

Me: “I’m pretty sure it is.”

Mail Lady: “It’s not.”

Damn. I clearly lost that battle of wits. And now the mail lady is probably spitting on my mail. So, moral of the story, if you mail me something, I’m probably getting it late  (and possibly, slightly wet).

Oliver Nolan Craigmiles

I would just like to send a belated “Welcome to the World” to little Oliver Nolan, my nephew born 4 pounds 13 ounces (and about six weeks ealry) to my sister in Portland, Oregon. I think he looks a little like an alien here, but i think that about all babies (especially pre-mies). 

So, I’m an uncle. I feel old.

The day Oliver was born, I spoke to Adam (my brother-in-law) on the phone while I was waiting for takeout in a Thai restaurant during my lunch hour. He described how well my sister my did in labor and how Oliver was fully healthy. He seemed generally excited and proud.

After listening to his stories and extending my “Congratulations on creating life”, I really didn’t know what else to say. What else can you say? It’s such a grand moment, that it completely dwarfs anything going on in my own life. 

I mean, what do I counter with: “Um, I’m pretty psyched about this Pad Thai Shrimp I ordered”, or “So, you wouldn’t believe this woman yelled at me for yawning on the subway”, or “I watched my girlfriend’s cats lick each other for about 15 minutes straight the other day”. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t the “grandiosity” of the moment that left me speechless, maybe I just need a more exciting life.

Anyway, congratulations Adam and Nicole on that whole, “creating another human” business. You won this round in the conversation wars.

Anyway, so I was waiting in line to get my sandwich and a flamingly gay guy (not that there’s anything wrong with that) in front of me orders his sandwich:

Guy: “I’ll take a meatball sub.”
Subway Employee: “Footlong?”
Guy: “No a six-incher is all I can handle.”

I had to summon every last ounce of my willpower to avoid laughing out loud (or LOL’ing as the kids call it). Neither of them even cracked a smile.

Then the girl immediately behind me (who was wearing way too much make up, a matching tracksuit, large hoop earrings, and was way too tan for winter) orders a “6-inch Italian” and starts hysterically laughing. Thank you! At least someone else realizes how ridiculous these orders are. Also, based on her appearance, something tells me that wasn’t the first time she made that order.

Subway: where penis jokes abound.

So I wake up on time, get ready, and arrive at the subway with plenty of time to spare . . . and then I realize that I forgot my wallet (with my money and metrocard) in my apartment. Oh, crap, I have no way of getting to the office. Doing the quick math in my head, I’m about a 15 minute round-trip walk to my apartment, plus the subway ride . . . oh no I can’t make it back. I have to figure out a way to get to work another way. Onto Plan B.

Plan B: I scrounge through my pockets and look for loose change, maybe I have $2 on me? I reach in and the first thing I pull out is a dollar bill. Jackpot, this will be easy. So I count up all of my loose change and it comes to . . . $1.80 . . . oh, so close, yet so far. I’m now picturing the dollar I gave out of my pocket to a guy playing guitar on the subway on Saturday night. Lesson: never help people.

Plan C: Ask the woman at the booth to buzz me through the handicap entrance. Our conversation went something like this:

Plan D: Stand in front of the entrance to the station and ask people for a quarter. Time is ticking away at this point and I am getting pretty desperate. First, I take off my fingerless gloves, because I’m trying to downplay the “homelessness” of my look. Even with time ticking down, I can’t bring myself to ask a large crowd of people for a quarter (which, is really how you panhandle). I don’t know why. I am hit with a sudden influx of self-pride and not wanting to take money from someone worse-off than me (which is completely ridiculous considering it’s only a freakin quarter). But anyway, I totally freeze. I sheepishly ask exactly two people for change, and they just keep walking. Ok, moving on.

Plan E: I notice a breakfast cart on the corner. Bingo, this guy must have tons of change from the constant transactions, plus he’s always in the same location so I can pay him back tomorrow. I open with my pathetic, “Umm, this might sound strange, but can I borrow a quarter and pay you back tomorrow ?” Words cannot describe how much I feel like a loser right now. Immediately, he replies, “Sure, sure, don’t worry about it”, and gives me $.50 (I tried to explain that I only needed a quarter, but he wouldn’t take it back, and time is really against me at this point, so I just take it. Cha-ching.)

I run down to the subway, buy a metrocard, run and just make a departing train, run from the subway to my building, take the elevator up, and step inside the office just as the clock strikes 9:15am. I made it!

Then I find out the meeting was cancelled. Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?

So as the train pulls away, I try to rearrange my belongings so that I can avoid leaning on the guy next to me. A woman taps me on the shoulder, points, and says, “Look, your scarf”. I immediately assume she is complimenting me on my lovely, blue scarf, but instead, she was pointing out that my lovely blue scarf was caught in the subway door (i still think she liked the scarf). So I laugh and try to pull the scarf out to no avail, since the doors on the subway close as tight as a bear trap. “I’ll just get it out at the next stop”, I tell the helpful lady, and I go back to what I was doing.

All of a sudden, panic strikes me when I realize that one end of the scarf is tied in a knot around my neck, and the other end of the scarf is dangling outside of the moving subway car. If the scarf outside of the subway gets caught on something, it could rip my head off. Literally. This is bad.

So I drop all of the bags I’m holding and untie my scarf as fast as I can. Thanks to my cat-like reflexes, I was able to remove the scarf  before my head popped off and rolled across the subway car (how terrifying would that have been for the people in my car? Serves them right for not moving away from the doors). At the next stop, I took the scarf out of the door, and continued on with my day.

I don’t like to use the word “Hero” often, but I think it applies in this situation.

Personally, I always thought that the flotation devices on large airplanes were purely for show (i.e. to give the passengers something to do as they plummet to their deaths) but apparently planes can land on water. Who knew? Well, I guess that pilot knew. Are more crashing airplanes going to attempt water landings in the future? I really don’t know the stats, but it seems whenever a plane crashes in the middle of a cornfield, people don’t walk away from it. Maybe water is the way to go (if you’re crashing, of course, you might want to aim for an airport if your engines are still intact, since passengers seem to prefer it).

It also probably helped that the plane crashed in the Hudson River next to Manhattan, as opposed to a random river in the middle of nowhere. There are about ten different ferries on the Hudson at any given moment and that really sped up the plane evacuation. So make a note, if your plane is going down, mention to the pilot to crash in a highly trafficked river.

The crazy thing is that this story should probably make me less worried, because all of the people survived. But it definitely makes me more worried. Stupid geese.

Anyway, I had my first video chat with my parents (to whom I gave a 10″ MSI Wind netbook for Christmas) on Skype. I gave them the netbook almost solely because I figured, at the very least, they would enjoy videochatting with me and my sister (who lives across the country in Portland, Oregon). My sister has a baby on the way, and since my parents live in New Jersey and won’t be able to “see” the baby that often, they can at least see it (I meant him, it’s not an “it”, it’s a him, I’ve been told) in this very Jetson-esque setting.

So my parents and I video-chatted away, both of us giddy to be using our new futuristic toys. This led to the highlight of the chat - my parents showing me the new toilet they installed in their bathroom. Seriously. It’s one of those dual-flush models (one flush size for #1, one flush size for #2) and it will save them money on water bills, plus it’s better for the environment, plus it has a seat that lowers automatically, which is better because it doesn’t slam and wake people up if you pee in the middle of the night, plus . . . (and on, and on they went as I stared at the screen in disbelief).

So years of technological breakthroughs, free software, and the purchase of two new computers culminated in this: Me staring at a toilet, via the Internet.

Isn’t technology grand?

So the moral of the story is, if you have a stable job and some money in the bank, it might be a good time to upgrade your digs.  I plan to buy a monocle and top hat and act extremely condescending to all the brokers/landlords I meet (”Dance for me, peasants, it amuses me). Because apparently I’m the only person left in the city who has a job.

The only thing left to decide is whether it’s time to leave Manhattan (Nooooo!!!) and make the jump to Brooklyn for more space, or take advantage of the bad economy and get a slightly smaller, livable space in the city. The places we looked at tonight weren’t huge, but they were substantially bigger than places in that price range last year. The search continues . . .

I spent about an hour in J&R debating between the Eee and the MSI Wind.  I actually purchased a Wind for my parents for Christmas and have been recommending it to everyone I know. But for some reason, in the store, I really liked the higher screen and mousepad of the Eee, despite that fact that the Wind is slightly lighter and has longer battery life (and was higher rated by the those people on the Internet).

I kinda feel like I betrayed all of the people i recommended the Wind to (Suckers!), but honestly, they’re pretty much the same computer. That didn’t stop me from asking every salesperson in the store for their recommendation (they were not helpful at all, and seemed somewhat annoyed I was asking them questions. I’m sorry for disturbing you and trying to buy a $400 item from your store) and making my girlfriend do type tests on both models (Ok, now type the same thing on this one).

By the way, the aisle with the little netbook computers was packed.  If J&R made an announcement that only 2 computers were left, I think a riot would have broken out (and I would’ve been the first person throwing down). Wall to wall people deciding what mini computer to buy. Not sure if that’s a good sign for the economy (a lot of people were shopping) or a bad one (they were all packed in the aisle with the cheapest possible computers), but it’s definitely something (Or not, what the hell do I know).