new york, new york

greetings one and all... to the big city and back... that's the extremely condensed version of my day.

i got up early and did some much needed straightening up around my room today... then jessica drove up from philly and got here around 10:30... we had just planned to go explore the MET (metropolitan museum of art) for the day, but apparently it was quite the day for crazy and/or talkative strangers as well...

stranger story #1: so as we're buying tickets for the NJ transit train to NY, the 11am train pulls up and leaves and we have to wait half an hour for the next one... so we find a spot in the waiting area where it's warm and a guy comes up and hands us fliers and asks "if you were to die today, are you 100% sure where you'd spend eternity?" i tell him yes, and he asks me how, and when i said because i believe Jesus died for my sins and i have a relationship with him, he still continued to chat for 15 minutes making sure i really really know that i'm saved... gave me fliers for rutgers campus christian groups and then went on to ask the same of other people. that's stranger #1... not crazy, just unexpected.

stranger story #2: so after the better part of an hour on the train, jessica and i get to penn station, and we've both been talking about how hungry we are for a bit so we found a soup and sandwich place in penn station to get a quick lunch... we got the last table in the place, and right next to us is a tiny old bag lady, who had finished her lunch, and was sleeping and snapping awake and asking questions about our food at intervals... i felt bad b/c i couldn't really hear her, but jessica could... maybe this is mean, but she reminded me a little of a furby... anyhow, eventually one of the restaurant workers told her she couldn't sleep at a table, she had to leave it for customers and chased her out... i felt bad for her, but i didn't understand her while she was there either (i think i'm slowly going hard of hearing, either that or i'm getting really bad at being able to filter out one input when there's a lot of background noise)... anyhow, that's direct stranger encounter #2 and the day's barely begun.

so, post lunchtime, jess and i meander through the NY subway system to get up to museum mile and into the met... checked out some of the asian art, a lot of european (mostly italian and dutch) paintings, some greek sculptures, a spiffy, photorealism exhibit, the modern art section, and back to some renaissance stuff... after a quick trip through the bookstore (i got a 1/3 original price book on budapest and vienna and how and why their architecture evolved as it did over time... it was fun to flip through, find pictures and go "i was there!" "i was there!", and it was only $5.) =), we headed back downtown towards penn station to get on home

stranger encounter #3: so we get on the lexington ave. line and as we do there's yelling 10 feet down the car we're in... some very unhappy crazy guy cussing out everyone near him... we listened to him for 44 blocks worth of subway, and even as we got out he was yelling who knows what at people for leaving the car! *he* was the kind of crazy that makes you feel unsafe to be anywhere near him... unfortunate

stranger encounter #4: back at penn station, jessica and i catch the train back to new brunswick (station nearest me) and at newark (2nd stop from NYC back down into jersey), 4 people got on and sat in the seats in front of us... when we got off in NB, so did they,... when we headed for the garage i had parked in earlier, so did they... they were only a dozen spaces away from my car, and for the first 5-10 minutes of driving they were directly by us... just ironic that it was like we were all mirroring one another for an hour... probably think more of it just because of out-of-the-ordinary people encounters all day long...

so that's the end of my stranger stories... so jessica and i enjoyed the MET, made it back just fine, went to chili's for dinner, came back to my place and looked at my pictures from the last two months, and now she's gone home.

amanda's car's in the lot here, but her away message says gone for the night... i think her parents were up for the day, i guess she went with them... go figure... anyhow, it was a quality day, and now i have the place to myself and should either get some sleep and get to work before church in the AM, or should get to work now.

oh! here's the other random thought of the day... so i've had a headache last night and since i woke up today... this is the 2nd 2-day headache i've had since i got back to jersey (just 2 weeks ago)... is that bad?

anyhow, either way, that's it... night.