Postcard from California.

It's been snowing all day, and it need not be said that it's a bitch to walk around outside. For a change cars are actually driving cautiously, though, so that's a plus. I feel this weather can only be appreciated when viewed several stories up in a heated apartment building.

So Alice took Joseph and me to a concert at the Phillipine Society building on fifth avenue. We got shitty directions so finding the place took much longer than expected. It turns it was the building that said "PHILLIPINE" in huge letters on fifth avenue. Who would've thought, you know? Anyway, the performance was nice, the reception had good food, etc. For dinner we trekked through the tundra of Times Square, searching for an Applebee's. I know, I know, Applebee's has disgusting food, especially in comparison to every other restaurant in the city. I had a craving for cheap American food, though, so I convinced Alice and Joe that we should eat at said restaurant. Applebee's wasn't too crowded when we got there, which was surprising considering the amount of tourists we saw outside. I remembered why I hated eating at places like Applebee's, though, particularly in Manhattan. For one thing, the only other people who occupy the restaurant are fat tourists from somewhere in the midwest. When these people come from Bumblefuck, USA to check out New York City (which to them is basically Times Square), they're drawn to the familiar restaurants from back home. All of the crappy franchise restaurants are gathered in only one part of Manhattan, and that's in and around Times Square. Any resident New Yorker knows that the no-name Italian restaurant on their block serves delicious food at a reasonable price, so who the fuck would need the Olive Garden or TGIFriday's in their neighborhood? But these are the only restaurants the tourists know, and so they flock to Applebee's and wherever else. The restaurants are placed in areas with the highest volume of tourists, i.e. Times Square, and then the prices on the menus are doubled because they know how vulnerable tourists can be. So, to make an unnecessarily long story short, I ended up paying $16 for a fucking quesadilla burger that normally would've cost me $8.50 in any other part of the country.

Fortunately the 1 train was directly outside of Applebee's, so we took it uptown. At 103rd street the train stood for a long time with its doors open, and over the loudspeaker was this unintelligible Indian man giving directions to the other conductors of the train or whoever. Nobody was quite sure what was going on. Alice and I were laughing like jackasses for a while making fun of the situation, when some lady across the aisle told us to be quiet so she could hear the announcements being made. Even in complete silence they were hardly audible and/or impossible to understand. So then we started laughing out loud even more.

After a while Alice was afraid something terrible was going to happen on the train, so we got out and stood in the platform for a little bit. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. A man was screaming in agony down at the other end of the train, and that was incredibly disturbing, so Alice insisted that we leave. When we exited the station and got up to the street, we saw an ambulance and a firetruck parked outside the stairs leading into the subway, but no personnel or victims or anything like that around. I have no idea what happened.

So, we caught the bus, which was a lot more comfortable than the subway car. Joe sat shooting the breeze with the bus driver, who told us to keep education an important part of our lives and to never do drugs. Joe believes that bus drivers are truly philosophers.

I found a fascinating article on PsychCentral.com about the stigma of mental illness. Hopefully someday this will all change. Read