Last week I had the face-melting pleasure of visiting the grand old city of New York, New York. It was incredible, and I’d have stayed much longer than a day had I the time. There’s hardly a drought of NYC vacation logs on the Internet, so I’ll spare the ramblings about the skyscrapers and Lady Liberty; but I must at least say this: Mars 2121, despite being both a delicious and fun restaurant, smacks of a fancied-up Chuck E. Cheese.
Something more interesting than the buildings, themed restaurants, and historical monuments was the immense variety of people. All shades of colors, all income levels, all with their own set of interests and personalities. And I had my camera.
But how do you photograph someone from a place like that? Everyone seems so pretty, so important, so hurried. I was tempted a few times to ask certain people, “Excuse me, may I take your photograph?” but stepped down out of fear of being punched in the eye or kicked in the navel. Instead, I just put on the appearance of a crazy tourist snapping pictures of buildings, when in reality I was really just a crazy tourist snapping pictures of people.
In other news, I work at a bookstore now. With my employee discount and our already cheap prices, I’ve been tempted to buy a few books. After getting my first paycheck, I almost pulled out the few books I’ve been eying; but, in the nick of time, I decided against it and went to the library. It turns out you can save lots of money by just checking out books from your local library! And there are additional, even-more-significant bonuses that you get from library books that don’t come at a bookstore:
- Strange smells
- Yellowed pages
- Ability to know that your book was first checked out on October 7, 1988
- Brown smudges
- Contagious diseases
- Illegible markings
In fact, I’m still trying to decipher what the markings mean in my borrowed copy of The Screwtape Letters. For whatever reason, some dastardly fellow scribbled on multiple pages. Was his intent to highlight his favorite passages? Or did he (or she) simply not like the material on pages xix, xxv, 1, 41, 48, and 53?
I don’t know, and neither did “Rg”–the alias of one of the librarians–who first noted the markings on January 1, 2004.