Posted April 13th, 2003 by Michelle

This has felt like one of the longer days of my life. Not a terribly interesting one, but there were certainly more than 24 hours. I was up by 8, on my bike by 9, dressed and ready for work by 10. After a rather boring and not very lucrative eight hours, I was out into the late afternoon sun at 6. I took a short ride up the West Side Highway, one of my favorite bike paths on earth, and then rode to Laughing Lotus for a 7:30 yoga class. At 9:30, I carried my bike down the subway stairs (I don’t ride the bridges at night) without stopping for a bite to eat, since I just wanted to get home.

So here’s the funny part. I ride the three stops to my transfer, but as luck would have it, my transfer train was not running. So I carried my bike up and down another two flights of stairs to get on the train going back the way I came. Which I did, to Canal Street, because my Q train is also on Canal street. When I got there, I checked out the map, carried my bike up another two flights and rode in the nighttime traffic to Broadway. I carried my bike down TWO MORE flights of stairs, only to find that the particular Q entrance I chose did not have a booth, and therefore did not have the big “special entry” door, but only the person-high turnstiles surrounded by metal bars. I couldn’t bear to go up the stairs again, so I tried to squeeze both me and the bike through the turnstile- which naturally didn’t work- and then I got the bright idea to take the front wheel off. By the time I did, the time on the turnstile ran out. My metrocard is an unlimited, which means that you have to wait 18 minutes between each use. Oh. My. God. I put my bike down and lamented my situation for a minute or two when a tiny Korean woman came up to me. She had watched the whole thing. “You use my card,” she said. “Really?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “Two dollar fifty”. Which I fished out of my pockets. She ran her card, me and my bike sans front wheel barely squeezed through, and then she handed me my wheel through the turnstile. I thanked her, and then realzied that I was at the N and R platform. To reach the Q, I kid you not, I had to carry my bike down three flights and up two.

So I get to the Q platform, my legs weak from the riding and the yoga, my arm feeling like a noodle, and I wait. And wait. And wait. Twenty minutes later, it came, I rode it, carried up two last flights, sailed two blocks home, and… gasp… carried my bike up my brownstone steps. Here’s the double kicker. I get home to a bed covered in, well, Zooey pee, and other messes in the kitchen and bathroom. All I want to do is eat a bowl of cereal, take a bath, and go to bed. And instead, the first thing I do is take a trip to the laundry room. Oh. My. God.

Really, I’m not complaining, much as it sounds I am. But if I’m going to be this tired at the end of the day, I want to be saving lives or curing cancer or something a little more rewarding.

Last week, I met this guy who is a good friend of a co-worker. The co-worker has been trying to set me up with him for months and we finally met after a show one night. I was, uh, well, on my fourth gimlet so I wasn’t in any sort of state of sobriety and the next morning I knew we talked at some length but I couldn’t remember the whole conversation. So today, as I joke, I asked my co-worker if the guy thought I was a freak. “Yeah!” she cried. “He said you grilled him about his family. He’s having a really hard time with his family so it made him really uncomfortable.” Christ. I remember that I had felt like I was talking too much so I asked him about his family. And he replied in detail. If it made him uncomfortable, he should have freaking said so. I’m so tired of this. I was asking him questions, which in my mind is the way to get to know someone. He was really nice otherwise, but I wasn’t drawn to him in any way, and this closes the deal. You simply have to know how to ask for what you want, or what you don’t want. Yeesh.

Word on the street (and in some news sources) is that the pulling down of the statue in Bagdad was staged, that the Iraquis kissing our flag and stomping on Hussein’s image were ex-pats flown in for this specific purpose. Huh. Put that in your hat and chew it.