Blue. No, yellow!

Yes, I am once again jobless (my internship ended last Friday). This makes me very stressed out and anxious, but it also affords me the luxury of staying up past 4 am to chronicle all the absurd things that happen in New York City. Truly, more delightfully ridiculous things happen here than anywhere else in the world. For example: yesterday I took my friend Megan to Taqueria y Fonda (the Mexican restaurant I used to go to all the time during my brief stint as a Columbia student). Megan pointed out a sign on the wall that I had never noticed before. It said: "CPR AVAILABLE. ASK THE MANAGER." We came up with all kinds of Monty Python-worthy jokes about it:

DINER: Manager, my chest feels a bit tight. Do you have any CPR available?
MANAGER: I'm so sorry, we just ran out.
DINER: Well, all right. I'll have an enchilada instead.

Tonight I went with Megan to see her friend Diana perform an experimental dance thing. Afterwards we went to a falafel place in the Village, and as we sat there eating schwarma and date cookies, something very funny happened. A bunch of police cars appeared, sirens wailing, and at the head of the pack was a taxi cab outfitted with a siren and flashing lights-- an undercover cop car!!!!

But I think the very funniest part of the night was my ride home on the subway. It was about 1am when I stepped onto the train. I started making my way toward the nearest empty seat, but backtracked when I realized that the seat proximal to it was occupied by a psychotic man in a fedora who screamed in fits the whole ride home. I watched him through a clear plastic dry-cleaning bag someone had hung up on the handrail. The people sitting around him paid him no attention, and, in fact, talked over him. On the other side of the car, a bald woman with foot-long earrings and flannel Obama pants tried to read a book while the dude sitting next to her carried on a heated and intensely private argument with his girlfriend across the aisle. They hardly noticed when a big black man in a kilt squeezed onto the seat next to them, excusing himself politely. He pulled out a stack of dog-eared photographs and flipped through them, pausing at one, which seemed to be a picture of himself in his BVDs. At the last stop in Manhattan before the train crossed over into Brooklyn, a middle-aged businessman stepped into the car. He turned to me and said, "You know how you can tell it's Friday night on the subway?" I shrugged. A dozen feet away, the psychotic man sputtered in rage. "The smell of alcohol," the man finished, and disappeared at the next stop.