A new favorite route: West Broadway from Houston down to Canal.

I so sad.
I watched the series finale of "Friends" all alone.

I Saw Her on the L Train

March 28, 2004
By JASON GORDON



THE New York subway has become the city's last bastion of
hope for romantics. That's partly because the subway is one
of the only places where people aren't subdivided into
small cliques depending on social class or musical tastes.
And instead of the carefully selected and touched-up photos
that people present online, under the bright, fluorescent
lights of the subway you can see exactly what someone looks
like. There is no dark lighting to cover a premature
wrinkle, a scary makeup job or a bad hair day.

The subway exposes people when they are their most
unfortunate selves, and I, for one, love it. Every day,
millions of naturally stunning women parade in front of me,
and all I have to do is look up from my seat to appreciate
them.

From a distance, I admire these beautiful women, and I
speculate about them, based on how they're dressed. You can
tell who feels comfortable in a pants suit and who'd prefer
to be wearing a thrift-store dress and fishnet stockings.
But who knows if the woman in a Versace business suit
really has a thing for leather?

Recently, a friend told me that she had seen in the subway
a man so beautiful she felt like a 16-year-old looking at a
photo of Luke Perry at the peak of his "Beverly Hills
90210'' fame. She pictured their entire future together. I
told her that she had just had her first subway crush.

A subway crush is simply someone you most likely will never
talk to or even meet, but will stare at adoringly from
afar. It's a crush in the simplest, most intense sense of
the word. During the limited span of your ride, you can
imagine any future you want with this person. She or he may
not even be your type, but you find yourself becoming
temporarily infatuated.

Could it ever go further?

I will always remember the day I was riding the L train and
a young woman sitting across from me was reading John
Kennedy Toole's novel "A Confederacy of Dunces.'' She had
short black hair and was wearing your standard Williamsburg
outfit of Converse, stockings, and all black everything
else. It was the novel that brought her to my attention.

The words immediately formed in my brain. "That's one of my
favorite books."

Amazingly, she smiled at me and asked me what I was
reading. I told her it was a manuscript of David Brock's
new book, "The Republican Noise Machine,'' and explained to
her its premise. She immediately went into a little rant
about how important it is for people our age to be involved
in politics.

It turned out she worked for a cause I really believe in.
At this point we were both just smiling at each other,
waiting for one of us to ask for the other person's phone
number. I asked first, and she gladly gave it to me.

The next day I called her and asked if she wanted to go out
the following evening. She said yes and plans were made,
but that night we bumped into each other at Dan Kennedy's
reading of "Loser Goes First." It was a complete
coincidence but a great one. We spent the entire event
together.

We confessed to each other our love for David Sedaris and
Scrabble. We confided to each other our favorite private
hideaways in New York, where we can go and not see anyone
we're friends with. Mine was a park near Riverside Drive.
Hers was a doughnut shop in Chinatown. She hated new bands.
I loved finding them. She didn't own a computer. I was
addicted to mine.

We dated for a year before moving in together. I was
against marriage and so is she, but after three years
together she wanted a ring and I gladly got it for her. It
was a small ceremony and we both cried. We pooled our money
in a bid for me to run for governor, then senator. I won
and we moved to Washington. We had three children, named
Jagger, Bowie and Moz. I was asked by my good friend
Hillary Rodham Clinton to be her vice president. I
accepted.

Eight years later, I ran for president and easily beat
Giuliani. My wife was the most fabulous first lady since
Jackie O. We retired young and moved back to Manhattan,
where on a gorgeous spring day I caught her sunbathing on
the roof of our brownstone rereading "A Confederacy of
Dunces.''

That, at least, was my fantasy; in reality, I never said a
word. I thought about her for a week or so, I told my
friends about this woman I saw reading my favorite book and
I even checked the Missed Connections section of
Craigslist. I hoped I would see her again, but I don't know
if I'd even recognize her.

Jason Gordon is editor of the Web site Product Shop NYC, an
online popular culture magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/nyregion/28crush.html?ex=1081769499&ei=1&en=2806d6abb9cfd4fa

Joe's Style Meter: The shorter the sideburns, the nerdier the guy.

However, it is not necessarily true about longer sideburns.
Elvis = cool
Elvis impersonators = not cool

I'm afraid of cutting my hair short because I think my hairline has receded. Scary.

Do you ever feel like everyone else is having more fun than you?

Two young couples told me this weekend that they are expecting a baby. They both married within the last two years. I am very excited for them. And despite all the talk about how people change when they marry, and how life as they know it is essentially over when they have children, I think they're still the same people. They're now just people who got married. They're now just people with kids. Just because you graduated from college doesn't make you a different person from the one you were pre-bacalaureate. You just now have a degree; and having it means that you have more privileges and different responsibilities (which one can opt to not take, of course).

All of this is to say, yay, I'm glad my married friends are having children!

It's been a while.
Went to AC last night. Left not losing my shirt. Good times.

I hate being sick. And I've noticed that a lot of people are ill lately. Not a good way to start the year, but it does give you a little time to think about what you want to do. However, for me, it's another reason to procrastinate on getting started on those resolutions.

Home Alone 3 is totally different from the first two. It doesn't flow at all. And this kid is smarter than the other one. He's all scientific and....stuff. He has all these little home-made inventions. Macauley was cute, but dumb. And this one, it's all high-tech. The "thieves" are trying to retrieve some high tech chip that's gonna ruin the world. Oh, I'm talking about this because it's midnight on a Sunday and I'm awake because I took a nap earlier in the day.

So, in the movie, this kid's bedroom is huge! It's not huge by suburb standards, I guess. It just got me thinking about how my bedrooms from since I was born have gotten smaller and smaller. I think my bedroom now is the smallest one that I've ever lived in, short of the ones I've shared (or my dorm room in college, but at least there was a sink in there).

Why the hell am I watching this?!

Wow, I haven't done very well on my reading list (left).
I haven't touched the first book.
Still working on the second.
Haven't touched the third.
And class is over so I don't have to read that anymore.

I've added EM Forster's Maurice, Margaret Cho's I'm the One I Want, and Mark Simpson's Sex Terror. You would think Margaret Cho's would be the funniest, but it's actually really sad. I'm waiting for the funny parts. And Sex Terror conjures up thoughts of freaky phalluses but luckily this book chronicles "Erotic Misadventures in Pop Culture."

To those who still read this...

Happy Holidays. Love what you got today.

Community, a Quality of the Heart
The word community has many connotations, some positive, some negative.
Community can make us think of a safe togetherness, shared meals, common
goals, and joyful celebrations. It also can call forth images of sectarian
exclusivity, in-group language, self-satisfied isolation, and romantic
naiveté. However, community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows
from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one
another. Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of
others more important than our own (see Philippians 2:4). The question,
therefore, is not "How can we make community?" but "How can we develop and
nurture giving hearts?"

I don't know why I'm surprised every time, but the vending machines at FIT are always out of Diet Coke.

What? There's a lot of pressure to be thin when you're at FIT. =)

I like Barbara Bush. I think she's the coolest old lady around.

Andy Pettitte's last name has too many t's for just two syllables.

This FIT class has some dumb people in it. DUMB.

Yay! Finally have internet access at home and can access Blogger. It's been blocked at work since July.

But nothing to say. It's been too long.

So, this new apartment I saw has this duplex thing where there's a spiral staircase inside the apartment that goes up to the second level. As I was walking down those narrow stairs that I was trying to navigate ever so gently, I suggested to my roommate walking behind me that we should really have something like a stripper's pole instead to make the trip go faster. She responded, "You mean, a fireman's pole?" Hmmm...what was I thinking?

Ha ha!
http://www.msnbc.com/news/920254.asp

I just like the title.

I think that Beyonce in her newest video looks like Shakira.