I'm probably completely paranoid, and all of the things I was worried about were nothing to actually worry about, but these are the ways I coped with being in an uncomfortable situation like the subway at 1 AM. I stood, I never sat - call me crazy, but I feel less vulnerable when I'm standing, eyes towards the longer end of the car, always careful to appear alert and not open to any kind of conversation. On the one hand, I'm under the impression that the subway is one of the safest parts of the city, but that doesn't make it any less frightening when the large white boy thug is walking back and forth between train cars repeatedly and acting like he was tweaking on something. Or the guy that pointedly switches cars to stand across from me, even if he gets off a stop before me. The fact that I made it onto the correct train felt like a minor miracle. And for the two block walk home, I carried my phone in one hand, ready to make that safety call and pretend like I had someone at home waiting for me, and my pepper spray tucked into my other jacket sleeve, ready at a moment's notice. I felt safer on my dark Bay Ridge streets than I did in certain parts of the subway itself, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared.
I'm sort of missing the excitement of tonight, though, and that is that I went to Times Square with two good friends who came to visit me. Well, less expressly to visit me than to continue their tradition of a road trip every summer, but I had a lovely time with them. Greg and Devon are easily two of the coolest people I know, so the joy of exploration was greatly multiplied by doing it with fun people. We met near Penn Station, and then wandered the two or three miles up to Bleecker Street, then back down to Times Square. We met an SCHC alum and ate some of the best pizza around, then went up to see 30 Rockefeller Plaza (that's right!) and walk up 5th Avenue. All of which was a fabulous experience, but Times Square at night for the first time was really an amazing sight.
In some respect, I feel like Times Square was completely logically backwards. It's as bright as daylight while it's late at night. There are tons of stores open when everything should be closed. It's one of the few places in New York where everybody seems to be a tourist. It's loud, and it's crazy, and it's absolutely packed with people, but it's got this electric presence to it, like some kind of palpable being with such a specific energy to it. It seemed incredibly appropriate, on finishing American Gods, that I would wander into one of the places Gaiman talks about as being a holy site to the American people, a place where people naturally congregate and where the very land is different somehow. I don't know quite how to explain it, and I honestly feel like it will take several, more lingering visits to be able to get a good grasp of it. Suffice to say that wandering through those streets, I finally saw what all the other tourists see, and I was intrigued. More on that in the next few weeks.
Finally, more computer frustration. My poor laptop is really feeling its age right now, and it's breaking my heart both that it's struggling so much and that I have to put in so much extra work. The hours of work that I've lost are the biggest frustration, but the fact that it takes so long for it to do that work just builds up the annoyance. Today I did about four hours of work before heading out. I saved and then froze, a lesson I learned (the most brutally hard way) last night, but realized (ironically) that it's the freezing that freezes my computer. I understand that all those roto brush strokes take a while to flatten, but coming back to my apartment eight hours later, it had stopped halfway through and caused the other two open applications to stop responding. God help me. I force quit and reopened, sure that I would at least have all the work I did earlier today, but After Effects is just refusing to re-render those strokes. This is such a cruel set of circumstances.
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