Shenanigans

The weather this week has been a pain in my backside.   Literally.  It snowed Wednesday night pretty hard and classes were canceled on Thursday, starting my weekend a day early since I don't have class on Fridays.  Hoorah, right?  Well, kind of.  The streets and sidewalks are kind of a treacherous mess after a snowstorm, and the shoes I wore on Thursday didn't exactly have adequate traction.  I think you can understand where I'm headed with this.  Needless to say, my backside became well acquainted with the crosswalk.  I wasn't too embarrassed though, because people were falling down all over the place.

Since my last post I have discovered Magnolia Bakery in the West Village.  Delicious.  And I have tasted the Mexican cuisine at Lupe's East LA Kitchen.  This was supposed to be promising.  But in the end, we decided to give it only 6.5 Nacho Libres (our new rating scale) out of a possible 10.  The atmosphere was good, and it was authentic.  But the service was slow and the food was meh and the prices were meh for the quality of food.  So the search continues.

Lastly, I will tell you about my little adventure last night.  Monica, Daniel (Aussie SNY student) and I decided to walk down the street to get something to drink.  In order to understand the circumstances, you should know that there is a club/venue right next door to my dorm called Santo's something or other.  And each night there is a different event or band or whatever. And each night the age limit differs.  Sometimes it's 18+, sometimes 21+, and sometimes it's all ages.  Last night was an all ages sort of night.  So as we walked past we saw a herd of 16-year-olds, although we were pretty intent on calling them 12.  And we joked around and amused ourselves with how cute they were.  But when we got to the corner, there was a girl in hysterics yelling at and trying to hold up this boy.  It was a huge scene.  She begged us to help her get a cab. And so we flagged one down and he agreed to take them if they had cash. But when he finally saw the mess that was about to enter his cab,  I guess he decided "to hell with that" and he peaced out.  So, now the girl is crying and freaking out and throwing this kid around because he can't stand up on his own.  And he hits his head a couple of times on the sidewalk, despite our best efforts to help her.  Finally the two bums sitting nearby come over and help him to sit on their cardboard box chairs.  At this point, a small crowd had gathered and someone had enough sense to cal 911.  Within minutes, a firetruck arrives and a little later the ambulance.  We had seen enough at this point, and I'll assume that the kid was taken to the hospital and is getting a good lecture from his mother today.  I felt sorry for the girl and the boy, but mostly I was annoyed.  I was mad that this situation even happened.  One of the bums summed it up for me quite nicely.  He said, "Boy you gotta get straight.  Is your life really that bad that you have to do this to yourself?"  And this coming from a man living on the streets.