On Thursday a friend of mine was in town for a short while so we got together and went out to dinner. We bundled up in our coats, scarves and hats against the cold and wind and wandered about so she could see some of the sights here in NYC before dinner. We had a delicious meal at a restaurant in midtown and I was walking her back to her hotel when I saw the strangest thing I have seen in quite a while.
There was a man going to the bank. He was swiping his ATM card to get into the vestibule because it was about 10:30 at night and the doors require you to swipe your card to get in at that hour. He was wearing a suit jacket, a dress shirt, trouser socks, and dress shoes. That was, in fact, ALL he was wearing. He was pantsless in the middle of NYC in the 28 degree weather!
My friend and I discussed it on the way back to her hotel and we decided that either he lost a bet and he had to walk to the bank pantsless and return with a reciept from the ATM as proof he upheld his end of things or he was mugged and they took his pants but his wallet was in his jacket pocket and he was getting cash to grab a cab so he wouldn’t have to be pantsless in the subway. This was the most amusing thing I have seen in a long time!
Could be he shat himself. It’s a nice thought, even if not true.
I’ve started noticing anthropomorphic faces in everything this week - the layout of rivets on railway track joints, the patterns on drain covers, etc. Weird, but I suppose it’s always been there.
It’s biting cold tonight here in the badlands of South London, UK. It seems any extremity not covered by clothing will go red and hurt (I have a hurty red nose! :()
I went out earlier this evening, about 8pm, and was feeling immensely grumbly about having to go out in the miserable weather. I was walking down the main road, a reasonably intimidating place as sometimes you can get a lot of hassle and feel a bit scared, but I was overtaken by a chap walking faster than me…but wait he wasn’t walking, he was skipping.
It was weird but cute - a grown man skipping along the road. It made me stop grumbling and put a smile on my face
That may not actually be as bad as it seems. It’s snowed twice in Blacksburg in the last week, and I’ve stayed in shorts. Hairy legs can work wonders for warmth.
Further evidence to go into my lifetime work, a dossier of evidence entitled “Don’t blame us southerners in general, it’s just them London types that are wimps”.
I got ambushed by a 70-year-old desperate to find a husband for her daughter, together with said daughter who told me how much she really, really, reeeeally wants to marry a foreigner. After I said I was married they asked if I knew anyone I could set her up with.
Oh, and did I mention I was in the waiting room of the cancer ward at the time?
I couldn’t decide afterwards if she was just really desperate or if I’d encountered the world’s least subtle black widow.
I was getting cash from an ATM vestibule around 10:00. Outside the vestibule were two women, one older than the other. As I passed them, I could hear them arguing but couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Then they raised their voices and said, with English accents (this is NYC):
Younger woman: Mum, did he die of a hemorrhage or was he f****** murdered?
Long dramatic pause/intake of breath from older woman, then:
Older Woman: All right, he was murdered!
I was dying (pun intended) to know what was going on but I don’t think there’s ever an appropriate time to interrupt a conversation like that.
The weirdest thing I saw in person was when I cleaned out the washing machine softener dispenser. The gelled softener build up looked like slightly mangled slugs in the sink.
The weirdest thing I’ve seen this week would be the homeless guy standing guard at the abandoned bakery building. He looked about 70, although it’s hard to tell with that type, and was decked out in tattered BDUs (adorned with various shiny objects on the left lapel), sandals, and a John Deere baseball cap. He was shouldering what looked like a kid’s replica of a .22 rifle and goose-stepping back and forth in front of the doorway, right arm a-swingin’ with every step. I imagine he thought the bakery was his “post”, but I didn’t stick around to ask.
Blacksburg; that explains that. Near as I can tell, the official winter uniform of Virginia Tech is seventeen sweatshirts and a pair of cargo shorts (men) or booty shorts with something written on the ass (women). I love me some cold weather, but that particular outfit always seemed so…incongruous.
It’s not weird to me anymore since I’ve seen him so many times, but every time I leave work to get on the New Carrollton Metro (Wash, DC) , there is this short , balding, 60ish year old man who greets everyone who passes him by. He never asks for money or anything. I’ve been working at my present job for almost two years, and since I first noticed him, he has been there every day. Not 80% of the time, not 99.9% of the time, but 100% percent of the time. Also, he as a “uni-dread”: a single 8-inch wide dreadlock going down his back. It looks sort of like those front door mats that are good for wiping your feet on.
On my way to school, there’s a telephone pole. Somebody has put up a poster with a picture of our Prime Minister, with the words “PRAY FOR A MAJORITY” in big black cap letters. Somebody else has scribbled in devil horns and a pointy tail–and blacked out his two front teeth, I think–and added in “DON’T” above the first message.
I saw a totally stereotypical woodpecker. Red head, with a tuft, land on a tree 3 feet away from me. “Wow, that jay looks just like some kind of woodpecker!”. Then it started pecking away on the log, hopping all over and pecking away.
We get many different types of peckers in the Pacific NW and they are all lovely in their own mottled-speckled-brown way, but in my whole life I’ve never seen a “Woody Woodpecker”, and there it was three feet from me.
