Strangers in the night.

The other day I ran into an old friend. You might remember her from my April 2007 entry.

I was outside of Avery Fisher Hall, walking through a huge crowd of ticket holders for the New York Philharmonic performance. As there were no student tickets, my companion and I opted to get a quick bite to eat at Ollie's. (He, visiting New York for the first time, later that evening understandably threw up from the shrimp lo mein.)

So we're foraging our way through the crowd, when suddenly I feel a small fist punch the side of my leg. At first I passed it off as an accidental brush, but when it started to sting, I realized it could only have been intentional. I turned, and standing against a large column at the edge of the crowd, was a small angry homeless woman. And she was glaring straight at me.

She and I became acquainted back in April on the 2 train. You see, I was talking the subway uptown at around 2am, when this troll-lady hobbled into the car with a few large bags and an unmistakable smell of cat piss. She looked at me, and mumbling some voodoo homeless mumbo jumbo, punched me IN MY BOOB. She just up and punched me! A nearby good Samaritan woman confronted the homeless woman, shouting, "If you punch her again, you're going to get one from me! You don't punch!"

What luck that two souls can reunite in such a crowded, lonely place as Manhattan. It's incidences like these that can make me truly understand the work of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.

A classic subway run-in.

On Saturday night I was punched in the right breast by an old homeless woman on the subway.

My friend Fernando and I were heading uptown from Penn Station at two in the morning when the incident occurred. We had just played in a string trio at Alice's cousin's wedding out on Long Island, which was the Korean side of the family. Alice is the product of a Korean mother and Jewish father, so needless to say she had an interesting childhood. As a child in school, while her friends were eating sandwiches with things like turkey or cheese or ham, Alice's mom packed her sandwiches with peanut butter and kimchi. You can see the impact this has had on her to this day.

Initially the bride's parents had been opposed to the marriage, so instead of that stupidly romantic feeling that one gets sitting in the audience during a wedding ceremony, there was an indescribable and rather uncomfortable tension amongst all of us. At the center of it all was the "marrying" couple, obviously feeling all too warm in the glow that the bride's parents practically radiated in disapproval. I noticed the groom had grown much thinner and looked anxious during and directly after the ceremony. The reception, thankfully, went much better. The food was great (guests were offered a choice of Korean or American cuisine), and despite getting carded by the bartender for wine (bullshit), I managed to have a good time. They played some great music, and Fernando and Alice busted a few moves for me on the dance floor. I couldn't believe how crazy these straight-laced middle-aged to elderly relatives directly from Korea could get while dancing, especially when Justin Timberlake's "Sexy Back" came on.

So after a great night of playing music, eating, drinking, and dancing (not to mention getting some
money out of it as well), Fernando and I headed back to Manhattan. Alice was staying on Long Island
at her parents' house.  We both have a pretty good buzz from the wine and dancing and all that, so we're standing in the middle of a crowded subway train just laughing and talking. Suddenly the train stops, the doors open, and I see this gray-haired homeless woman dragging two pieces of luggage and wearing all the clothes she owned, which made her look like an overstuffed armchair. What drew my attention to her was at first the overwhelming stench of cat piss that encircled her person, and then when I was able to examine her in detail, the bushy white and gray moustache that had sprouted above her thin upper lip. She had very large, wild brown eyes which looked horrified at the crowd the subway doors presented to her, and a small square jaw that flapped while she babbled inaudibly while trying to push her way onto the train. Truthfully there was enough room for her to move on, but for some reason she was having trouble. I was standing in the center of the car, a good five feet or so away from the door. I certainly wasn't in her way.

Well, something snapped in her, and suddenly her fist was flying in the air and landed with all its force on my right breast. Honestly it didn't hurt at all, but I was stunned into silence. Everyone in the vicinity was. A large woman who was boarding the train at the same time saw this and, outraged, began yelling at the old homeless woman. She yelled (literally), "DON'T YOU PUNCH PEOPLE. IF YOU PUNCH HER AGAIN YOU'RE GOING TO GET ONE FROM ME." She was going on like this, extremely angered by the situation, and I was even more stunned. I gave the large woman a pat on the shoulder in appreciation, but I'm not sure she noticed because she was so engaged in shouting at the homeless woman. Meanwhile everybody around me---the students from NYU with the thick-rimmed black glasses, the tourists from Bumblefuck, Minnesota, the gay Asian male escort in
the black leather pants, everybody---stared at the whole situation in disbelief; their focus would shift between the cat piss woman and the good (yelling) Samaritan to my reddened face. Thankfully I had to transfer at the next stop, so I did that quickly and quietly. I didn't know how to take the event. Should I have been shocked by the behavior of the homeless woman or by the large woman who
decided to defend a complete stranger on the subway at two in the morning?

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