A year with Nikki

Saturday, February 27, 2010

directions

Does anybody else have the problem where you get nervous when you give strangers directions?

A man stopped me tonight and asked me directions. He was trying to get to the Old Town School of Folk Music. I made sure I knew which one he was trying to get to (there are two of them) and then gave him directions.

But now I feel personally responsible for him.

Did he make it there?

Did he make the soft right onto Lincoln or did he accidentally take the hard right onto Ashland?

I should have been more specific! The anxiety! The worry!

Oh well, I'll never see him again so if he got lost it's not my problem.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

crazies

My brother spends a lot of time on the weekends at his friends' apartment. It is only a block from where I work so occasionally, if the timing works out, he will offer me a lift home from work on Sundays.

This weekend he didn't have his car with him but offered to take the el home with me.

So we are waiting on the platform and he asked if I take the brown or the red line. The red line is way faster but you have to climb a lot of stairs to transfer, you have to take your card out of your pocket again to transfer, it goes underground which I don't really like, and there are lots more crazies on the red line.

However, we had just missed a brown line so when the red line came we decided to hop on instead of waiting another 10-15 minutes for a brown line.

And sure enough, after we had been sitting for five minutes, a crazy homeless lady gets on our car and starts yelling and ranting. She ends up coming and sitting right next to me and almost whacks me as she swung her arms about.

After she got off, my brother turns to me and says, "You really do attract them, don't you?"

I recounted the story to my mom and she said, "Well, it's not so bad, attracting them, it isn't like they are mugging you."

So I reminded her of how I had just been robbed on the el a few months back and she just laughed and said, "Oh yeah!"

Anyways, for your viewing enjoyment, I took a little footage today of a crazy who was doing an impersonation of how "fools" act when they are riding the train and how they can't handle when the train moves and she thinks they are dumb. Sorry about the poor videography but I was trying to be discreet in the fact that I was filming her.

pay attention

I was going along, a little bit grumpy this morning. And I thought, WHAT IF?

What if this is it? What if this is the best my life is ever going to be? I don't think that's the case, but what if? Shouldn't I be enjoying it? What if this were the my last day on earth? Shouldn't I take it all in?

So I did.

I enjoyed the warmth of the heat on the train.

I enjoyed the zoom zoom! sensation of zipping along about the world as we flew by in the train.

I enjoyed the people around me.

And because I was doing all this I also got to enjoy the snow. The crazy snow we had this morning. The flakes were ridiculously big. I've NEVER seen them that size. It was like being inside a snow globe.

When I got to the station I took some video. It doesn't show you exactly what my eyes saw- the layer upon infinite layer of snow coming down. In the distance the flakes looked black because they were so big. It looked like a huge swarm of bugs were invading the city- but in a cool way!

And then, as life's little way of thanking me for paying attention and noticing how awesome it was, my pain-in-the-ass client canceled and I got to take one of my favorite clients instead!

Yeah life!