mia, in focus.

friday night we opened up the new apartment to all the wonderful people who helped us move. trying to show our appreciation in the sincerest way possible, we served them jambalaya and forced beer and wine onto them.

since the old and new apartments were on the same block, there was no way we were renting anything with wheels and an engine to do it. so the move involved a trip down three storeys, a walk down the block, and a trip up five storeys, all leg-powered. this sounds deceptively simple, but on the night we did it no one could manage to drink a beer after we finished.

my favorite part was hearing people reminiscing about what they moved themselves. see that thing? i carried that up the stairs. that sucked! . . . i need another drink.

i was in tenth grade history class, and we were learning about the ten commandments. (yes, even in tennessee i'm not sure that's legal, but whatever.) the teacher, coach hampton, went around the room, which was about fifteen people, and asked everyone if they believed "god was perfect."

not surprisingly, people knew what to answer whatever their opinion on the matter was. he finally got around to saying, "mr. gallaway, do you believe god is perfect?" i said, "no." and the class gasped audibly in unison, as though this were the most shocking thing they ever heard. (perhaps it was.)

coach hampton, never my ally, said, "now wait, wait, people. let's hear him out. that doesn't mean he's an atheist."

[this is the second half to the bus story from last friday.]

so after the mutiny, we start going again, and the guy next to me is a little wiry guy, who, judging from his accent, is probably from africa. he leans over, and in a totally normal voice says, "that is what i like about native american black people. they are very loud."

incidentally, this is the bus down 125th, and the majority of the bus is black, including the guy, and the woman who was yelling. and she's not five feet away, and i'm sure she can hear him.

he continues: "white people stay, you know, kind of civilized, but they. . . they get very, very angry."

you know when you are trying to show positive agreement to the person you are talking to, but are also trying to communicate to everyone eavesdropping that you realize they are talking crazy? i did that. "uh-hum."

"but it is very good. if she had not yelled, maybe we would still be sitting there."

"uh-hum."

so over the bus ride, the bus is becoming less and less populated, because the driver is not letting people on. the guy keeps talking to me:

"new york is reminding me very much of london. today it is very rainy and cold, and remember it was very, very foggy yesterday. very much like london in new york. today would be the perfect day to stay home. you have a cup of tea, and a nice black and white movie, and it would be a very good day."

then he says: "you know, i lived in manhattan for 21 years, and now i am in queens. the worst part is the commuting."

"yeah," i say, "people in manhattan don't understand how hard it is getting across the river."

"yes! yes, yes. and when i am going to work in the morning, instead of walking down to the subway, i have to walk up." he laughs. "it is daunting--you are tired and sleepy, and you do not want to go to work, and there are all these stairs. it is very bad."

then he says: "when i get into manhattan, i just feel once again that i am my own boss. it feels very nice."

so, because of the subway problems, he was taking a strange way to work, because he usually went from the N to the 7, but he had gone to the bus today. i told him to get off at 116th, where he could get the 1/9 and go to times square. he said thank you. then, when it was getting close to work, and there were only about four of us on the bus, i went to get up and wished him good luck.

he said, "oh, now you are going to leave me. well, very good luck to you, too. i know it will happen--god will let the money flow again, and i will be back in manhattan, where i belong. thank you, and have a very good day." and i got off. i liked him.

the other night at midnight our new super stopped by to drop off a carbon monoxide detector. i like supers who stop by at midnight, i think.

he's a young guy who lives with his father, and the father actually does most of the taking-out-the-trash kind of work. the son has another job, someplace in manhattan, and as far as i can tell he never sleeps and is intense and angry around the clock, smoking cigarettes down to nothing, until it looks like he is smoking his fingers. their arrangement seems to work well, except that the old man doesn't really speak english, so his powers (super-powers, if you must) are limited.

i have been speculating on their nation of origin for a couple months now. based mostly on intuition, i was guessing croatian. by stopping by at midnight with a carbon monoxide detector, he gave me the chance to give him a beer, which he drank in less than two minutes, the whole time talking about how the owners of the building are "fucking criminals."

he gave us a form to sign concerning his giving us the detector, and it had his last name on it, which ended in -vic, so i figured i was at least partly right and he was yugoslavian of some sort. so i asked. as a dumb american, i am sometimes unsure how to talk about such things, especially with people from the balkans (or the middle east, or ireland, et cetera) who have a lot of problems pertaining to ethnicity and their political history.

back at tulane, i used to work with a croatian, who told me a "vich" pronunciation of the last name probably meant someone was a serb. so when our super said his name that way, i asked if he was serbian.

he looked a little disappointed with me and said, "it does not matter, the way they say the name. i am slavic, like the russians."

then he said, "josh, you are very lucky, with such a beautiful croatian girl" (meaning mia, who is second generation). and he waved with the empty beer bottle, and left.

our door buzzer is broken in such a way that we can buzz you in, but you can't ring the bell to tell us you're there. this is annoying but manageable.

the other night i was calling to get mexican food delivered, and after taking my information the guy went to hang up. i panicked and said wait wait wait!, trying to get in "our buzzer is broken, so you'll need to call when you get to the building." but he cut me off in mid-sentence and said, "it's OK, i have called you before. OK. good-bye."

the guy at viva el mariachi has either my address, voice, or order memorized. i really should cook more. i wonder if he knows my mother's maiden name.

as we all know, if it more than drizzles, the new york city subway system has a very hard time coping for some reason. if i wake up and don't see bright sunshine pouring in the window, i wonder which subway to the outer boroughs will be flooded and stuck somewhere between stations, not running, and how many of my co-workers will come in soaking wet and telling animated stories about walking from 60th to 120th.

this rainy day i was not thinking, and walked to the N station. when i rounded the corner to the turnstiles, i saw what looked like a soviet-era bread line from albania, with people passed out and lying all over the stairs and screaming babies and a mostly incoherent man standing right on the other side of the turnstiles waving his arms around and saying, "no trains, no trains, there are no trains, no trains for long time, long long time!"

in one fluid motion i turned right back around and walked down 31st street to the bus stop, which is how i normally come to work anyway.

when i got to the bus stop, there was a solid rectangle of people, exactly the size and shape of the shelter, and the people in front were being heavily rained on, sacrificed for the souls at the interior of the rectangle. for not a minute or two i waited, and then three (3) M60 buses pulled up in a line, calmly splashing water across the aforementioned people in the front.

we load up on these obviously late-as-hell buses, and my fellow bus riders are silent, all vibrating their mutual anger to each other, buzzing with the pregnant chance that they may at any moment become one monster that then tears the bus to pieces for no reason other than pure evil. seriously, you could feel it. it's pin-drop silent, and i was scared of these people, my fellow riders.

over the triboro bridge we go, and at the first stop in manhattan we watch the other two buses stop, disgorge people, and go on their way. and our bus sits with its door open. and keeps sitting there. and sits.

the murmur builds, and then explodes when a heavy-set lady with bleached hair, whom i see every morning, screams, "you gotta tell us what the fuck is wrong with this bus! you fucking can't fucking just fucking sit here and not fucking say a fucking word! you at work, and we're trying to get to work!" and then all hell breaks loose, and i think i am the only person on the bus not yelling obscenities.

as if from nowhere, a soaked man in a button-down shirt and a tie is in the aisle, with his sleeves rolled up, and he has his finger leveled at the woman who started the yelling. "i am the dispatcher, and i have a driver who had to bring a bus from queens with a broken mirror. i had to repair the bus for him, so you should--"

"fuck you!" the woman yells, and then everyone is yelling. "a broken mirror, fuck you a broken mirror!"

the man says, "yes, thank you ma'am, right back at you," and turns around and walks back out into the rain, his finger pointed at her the whole time.

once we got going, for some reason the driver refused to pick anyone else up. he'd open the door to let people off, but then say, "no, no, don't get on my bus, stay off my bus," to anyone who tried to get on. maybe he was afraid of increasing the size of the crowd against him--i don't know.

it was the greatest bus mutiny i have yet seen.

from 1992 to 1997, i attended case western reserve university. most people understand that you shouldn't have too many articles of clothing that have your school's name on them, and you can count me happily in that camp. however, i do have a sweatshirt that says, plainly, case western reserve. sometimes i wear it when i run.

today i had it on, and on the subway an older guy across the aisle waved at me and said, "did you go to case western?" i said yes, and he started chatting me up about school. he asked if i was an engineer, and i said yes.

he said, "are you going to make the next atomic bomb?"

we were going under the river at the time, and he kind of had to shout it.

i said, "i'm going to try to avoid that."

view from the fire escape, astoria, queens.

finally, our new apartment is feeling homelike. for anyone who has not had the pleasure of hearing me bitch for the past few months, we have been in some stage of moving since late september, when we started looking for a new place.

our old apartment was well put-together, and we liked it, but it was a special kind of small that gets on your nerves over time. so since we'd lived there for a little over three years, we decided it was time to move. the first place we found, the landlord decided we didn't make enough money, and the second place we had an argument with the landlord about whether or not we could take out the carpet. imagine an old romanian man made almost entirely out of cigarette smoke. "no," he said. so by then we were finding a third place.

the third place, this place, was torn almost completely apart when we rented it. holes in the floor, bare pipes sticking out of the wall where a sink would have been, a dark brown tub. but we rented it, because they were renovating it. what followed was a solid month and a half of daily yelling at them on the phone so they would finish each little piece of the work. i love honest people. but it seems to have slowly worked itself out, and we've lived here now for about a month.

yesterday we got a mailbox. i mean, what says now it's home more than a mailbox? so i guess it's official. hello, new apartment.

today in the mail i got my first check for publishing something. it was for one hundred dollars, cash money. unfortunately, the check was from the american chemical society, for part of an article in chemical reviews, which was about osmium redox polymers.

did i say osmium redox polymers? i meant my article about big tittied women.

sorry, no i did mean osmium redox polymers--i was just trying to get your attention back.

what can i say? the first time anyone ever paid to hear what i had to say, it was about osmium something somethings. and i'm thirty. i mean, i am losing my virginity so-o-o-o-o late in life. and it turns out i'm a slut on top of that. shee-it. roll with it, josh, roll with it.

on new year's day, david and kim had us over for dinner. much of the crowd mia works with were there, some of whom i know well and some of whom were new to me. i spent most of my time going through their records and books while listening in on conversations. which is what i do at parties, making me officially lame. i also drink whiskey while i do this.

lance was there--imagine a rather animated character and you probably have something at least approximating lance in your head. after some coaxing, he produced a bag containing a game he has been working on for ten years. it involves stacking small blocks in particular ways, and we all had quite a time playing it.

he's pretty serious about this and told us about having a game agent who pitches your game to a game developer, who in turn pitches the game to hasbro or some other games company. you think writing poetry or songs sounds competitive?--what about making games, baby. he said they only put out a few new games a year. to me, the whole thing sounds daunting. but the game was fun. like, dude is my hero. i hope he makes three trillion dollars, and every toddler and wholesome family and drunken frat boy from here to the moon ends up playing his game.

i could have just been drunk, but he seemed like he really wanted me to play it because he knows i'm an engineer. normally this would seem logical, since it's a building and spatial-relations sort of game. but what he doesn't know is i'm a shitty engineer, who tends to hate games and tests of mental acumen, and likes records and books and whiskey instead.

but hey, i liked it, and for the remainder of the time i stayed out of the records and books. the whiskey will take more than that.