Pork Banh Mi from Banh Mi Saigon. Hooray Lunch!
♥ u and ur cats matthewgallaway
And so I walked into the moving glass chamber of the revolving door and as I did so I pushed shut my umbrella because it had started raining this morning pretty much the second I left my apartment and probably stopped while I was on the subway but then started up again with renewed force (if I can say that without sounding like the weather was ‘out to get me,’ although sometimes it does feel like that, I’m sure we’ve all been there) when I was waiting to walk up the stairs to the street, which is not exactly fun because it seems that a certain percentage of people in New York (some of whom are probably ‘natives’ and some of whom are probably ‘tourists’ this being a neighborhood in the vicinity of the Empire State Building) and I walked the two long blocks east to my office, pausing while some van spent about an hour backing into the garage and I said out loud ‘hurry the fuck up it’s fucking raining asshole’ which made me wonder if I’m turning into one of ‘those’ New Yorkers, which is to say one who mumbles angrily to myself like an insane person but on the other hand it was Monday morning and raining and my socks were already well beyond the point where they could be described as ‘crisp’ or perhaps even ‘arid’ (much less ‘desiccated’) and anyway as I already mentioned I walked into the revolving door, or more accurately sort of hopped in which can be nerve-racking if like me you have a fear of getting crushed by large, moving pieces of machinery (such as the automatic gate near the housing project on my block, which even features a graphic sign depicting a little man getting obliterated by the moving gate; it’s called CRUSH HAZARD and believe me I’ve spent a lot of time pondering that sign and whether or not I might be able to make a movie about my terror) but I didn’t get crushed in the door and in fact I sort of stutter-stepped through like a wide receiver in the open field with only one guy between him and the end zone as I closed my umbrella manually (i.e., not using the automatic button with which you open it, because that just doesn’t feel ‘intuitive’ to me) a decision I soon enough came to regret when, after I had made it through a second set of doors (this after showing my post-9/11 security card to the guard at the front desk) and my umbrella burst open and the woman next to me (whom I had held open the door for, incidentally) said something to the effect of ‘did you know it’s bad luck to open an umbrella inside?’ and I was like ‘ha ha yeah whatever’ while wearing a thin and no doubt somewhat exasperated expression at which point she added ‘don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone in case you’re going on an airplane’ and she may have even uttered the word ‘crash’ which made me think about how yesterday when in fact I was on a airplane going in for a landing at LaGuardia (this after a very bumpy flight two days earlier into Pittsburgh when the plane pulled up at the last second, i.e., literally ten feet from the ground, due to ‘high winds’) and anyway on the flight into LaGuardia I had the good luck to be positioned in the row right in front of a three-year-old kid and his (highly annoying) father who spoke loud gibberish and baby talk in my ear the entire flight but whatever the point is that we were heading down and the father was making airplane landing noises with the kid like “whhhszzz and zzzoooom” loud enough so that everyone on the plane could be like ‘oh what a lovely father who is soooo affectionate toward his son’ and then the little kid screamed ‘CRASH’ because this was obv a game they had played and the father with an unprecedented level of somberness and uncertainty was like ‘no, no — no crash’ (this as the rooftops of Queens were millimeters from my nose and the woman next to me who, despite choosing an aisle seat, felt compelled to lean over my own personal ‘airspace’ to peer out the window, which also made me agitated for reasons that anyone who doesn’t like someone else ‘reading over your shoulder’ should be on intimate terms with) and though we didn’t crash I felt jittery enough this morning after the flight to not really be in the mood to make light of such a thing for my lobby companion (i.e., the one who had referenced the ‘bad luck’ of opening an umbrella indoors) and so I just kind of turned to her and said in what I thought was a reasonable tone ‘I’m sorry but you’re not making me laugh,’ which led her to say with almost excruciating brightness ‘I can tell!’ and then we flooded onto the elevator, which was very crowded until it wasn’t (of course) and she got out one floor below me and was like ‘have a nice day’ in a way that seemed to convey her disappointment at my failure to join in with her joke (at my expense) and in response I just smiled (but thinly) and said ‘you too.’
THIS. Not to mention, I’ve stopped using my umbrella in the rain, finding it much more effective for prodding the slow walkers out of the way.
