This afternoon, while using the A/C platform of the Fulton street stop to get from the 4/5 platform to the side of the station that's directly under my apartment (convenience made manifest) I overheard someone playing the guitar and singing in a slightly Bruce Springsteen-esque voice. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn't half bad. I even entertained a whimsical daydream that this might be the kind of place one could possibly, if one were incredibly lucky, get a record deal. The second thing I noticed was that he was singing "Song for Dennis Brown" by the Mountain Goats. Which, with lyrics like "jets of contaminated blood will cloud the rivers and the lakes," is probably not a moneymaker when it comes to subway performances. But it got my attention. Although not my dollars (when I tried to give him a cheesy two thumbs up he didn't see and I felt awkward that maybe other people DID see and also he was kind of young and not broke looking so...)

This morning was something of a mess, at least in the public works department. This morning, in a hurry after hitting the snooze instead of popping up to go to the gym (because what morning do I ever pop out of bed?), I stepped aboard the C train and immediately found a seat (a seat!), only to realize seconds later that there was an eighteen or nineteen-year-old kid blocking the door and calling for a police officer. Fine. Whatever. A pain, a delay, but whatever. But then no police officer came. And it came to light that he was yelling because a woman no more than 5 feet tall had "punched" him in the back. And then she explained that it was only because he had been kicking her and wouldn't stop even after she repeatedly asked him. Then another woman joined the fray and announced that she had a job interview that she couldn't miss, then another man, seemingly calm and intent on conflict resolution, asked the woman to write down her name so that the young man could give it to the police upstairs and everything was starting to look up...

But then the kid was still half-heartedly calling for a police officer after receiving the woman's nameand the seemingly calm man announced that he was a corrections officer and that he was going to "lock up" the yelling kid if he didn't stop holding up the train, and then something must have gone horribly wrong very quickly because the next thing I knew the corrections officer had shoved the kid off the train and was more or less chasing him down the platform with the intent to inflict some manner of bodily harm and the two women (the initial assailant and the one with the job interview) were chasing after the corrections officer and telling him not to get himself in trouble.

And then eventually he got back on the train and the kid was nowhere to be found and everything resolved more or less as quickly and inexplicably as it had started.

Except:
Where were the MTA employees during all this?
For that matter, where were the police?
What if this was a slightly less ridiculous assault charge?
What if I was the assaulted party?

In the words of a very wise woman after the doors shut and we were on our way, "Ladies and gentlemen, it's only Tuesday."

At the ripe old age of 22 (newly ripe, like 22 and... [counts] 3 days), I think I'm finally falling apart. It's either that, or the winter, or seasonal affective disorder, or laziness, or a sinus infection. Whatever the cause, every day it's increasingly easier to justify an additional five minutes sleep, or taking the day off the gym, or falling asleep on the couch.

Did you, loyal readership (of one, most likely), know that you can get a brain abscess from an untreated sinus infection? Or maybe I'm allergic to my cat.

It's enough to tempt me towards tanning or alternative medicines, or incorporating lots of gingko into my diet. But then that shit is expensive and I'm not going to spend my money to have someone poke me with pins when I could poke myself with pins and while some might make the argument that doing it yourself doesn't work because you don't know how to do it, that is exactly my problem with the so-called professionals as well -- without licensing and FDA approval, what makes you an acupuncturist and me a civilian and the guy down the street a tattoo artist, huh? And this is why I haven't left work for an appointment with the acupuncturist (or the ENT, for that matter) yet, or ever.

As this recession creeps along, slowly cutting down the working masses until absolutely no one has a job anymore and we're all reduced to an elaborate barter system, it's starting to hit closer to home. While I believe I have a modicum of job security, given that they pay me nothing and I don't get benefits and am not an official employee to begin with, several of my friends with similarly entry-level jobs (though I'm pretty sure they have benefits because it's ridiculous that anyone doesn't have health insurance... Obama '08...) are beginning to see their co-workers picked off. One one hand, it makes the fact that you have a job (any job) feel kind of exciting. On the other hand, it completely dims the prospect of having a better job in the near future.

It seems, though, that we as a working class (term used loosely, of course) are developing little games to save off despair. For instance, a friend said that as people in his office were getting fired, other people tried excessively hard to make light of the situation while everyone else was avoiding eye contact and clutching their staplers like security blankets.

We've not been doing so much of that around here, but in order to reassure myself that I'm not going to be an assistant for the rest of my life, I've been taking some cues from my unemployed friends and pursuing informational interviews. In theory, these basically mean getting together with someone who has a job you want and talking to them about what it would be like, hypothetically, for you to have that job and what you'd need to do to get it if, hypothetically, there wasn't an iron clad hiring freeze in every industry you would even consider pursuing a job in. In practice, though, this really consists of emailing someone you would never have any reason to email (or, in some cases, whose email address you would never even have) and asking them out for a drink so you can meet them and hang out under the guise that you're only hanging out because the economy sucks whereas the real reason is that you want to hang out with them because you think they might be cool.

In other words, it's a platonic date with that cheerleader/football player from high school who you were always too scared to talk to.

Recently, I got to work too early with good intentions that were essentially squandered and thwarted.
Less recently, though, I got a tattoo, which I will write about in the free time I have as a result of my squandered and thwarted good intentions.

All in all, the tattoo has been a very positive, only moderately painful, process. It hurt about a 7 out of 10 during the process, and there was a point where three of us simultaneously mistook blood for unanticipated red ink, but the memory of it has completely worn off, such that I'm thinking of what I'd get as a second tattoo, which is more or less what a man in the shop said as soon as I entered and declared my desire to get a tattoo (specifically, he said, "They're like potato chips" and added, as I stared in confused silence, "once you have one you can't stop there." It seemed beside the point to tell him I don't like potato chips), but I digress.

Because,
The real remarkable thing about the tattoo is that... [drum roll please]
Apparently no one at work has noticed. Or, at the very least, absolutely no one has commented on it, unless I showed it to them and announced its presence.
Which means that either:
a) Everyone at my work is really unobservant.
b) Everyone has noticed, but because I'm so cool and rebellious by nature they assume I've always had it and they just never noticed before (aka, I am the kind of person who would have a tattoo, and was prior to actually acquiring the tattoo, so it's not been a major change in their eyes).
c) Everyone has noticed, but feels too awkward or horrified to bring it up (I'm hoping this isn't the case, and it seems unlikely since I was previously one of the only people in my department without one).

Also, the horseshoe is symmetrical in real life, but my arm is twisted in the photo so it looks off-kilter. I like to think it's dancing.

A wise person once said to me that being on break from college is like "a vacation to being fifteen." You live with your parents, which means you can't drink or smoke or make out with random strangers because you have no place to do it besides your car (which is I guess something different from being fifteen, except that you're now at a point in your life where it seems ridiculous to do any of those things in a car because you've gotten so used to doing them in your twin XL).

Now that I'm no longer in college, however, I'd like to submit for approval that having two weeks off from work for Christmas is like "a vacation to that week before classes start when everyone's just come back from break and you haven't seen eachother in a while and basically don't do anything besides eat and sleep and drink" (aka Camp Yale, for those who share that particular allegiance). Essentially this is the opposite of the "vacation to being fifteen" because you can drink and smoke and make out with random strangers because everyone has converged in New York and it doesn't matter that you don't have a car because you have an APARTMENT! (or a friend's floor, or a random stranger's floor, if you're trying to do the "make out with random strangers" thing).

Except the return to work is even more brutal than the start of classes because it's a return to something old, rather than something new and potentially exciting, and because having a job doesn't have the same interesting plot arc that classes have. With a job, you either have it and it's the same, or you don't have it and you either got fired or promoted, which is more of a steep cliff than an arc.