New York Talks Back!

OK, that's a lame title for what I want to write about today.  The first is an update on my 'roommate' situation.  I've mentioned this to two New Yorkers, and they've both advised the same thing: if that pigeon gets any closer, shoot it with a squirt gun.  It's funny that a requirement to have a NY apartment is a squirt gun for pigeon patrol.  It's funnier that two separate people had the same response.  And it's not like they thought about it at all.  They just said, "Oh yeah.  You should shoot it with a squirt gun."

 

Second, I had an experience yesterday that exactly mirrors an early experience I had in San Francisco.  Back in 1999 when I first started living and working in San Francisco, I witnessed a woman cleaning her ears out with a q-tip on the J Church line.  For those of you who don't know the full minutiae of my neuroses, I have a thing about ears and things in them.  I don't like experiencing it, I don't like watching it.  I actually have q-tip phobia.  Well yesterday took it to a whole new level, and possibly freed the q-tips from the equation.  I was standing on the subway (I can't remember if it was a C or E train), and the woman sitting beneath me was cleaning out her ears with the pointy part of a ballpoint pen cap.  This was obviously revolting, but in a packed subway car when you're holding the bar right above this monstrosity, it's not exactly a possibility to move.  And just like in the J-Church incident, no one else seemed to notice.  I wonder how long I have to be an urban girl before I actually am unfazed by these things.