holy crap

so basically the great plan from yesterday (meet at 88th) was throw into disarry by two more people who wanted rides, and wanted to be picked up at 95th street.

said people decided it was "too cold" inside and went inside instead of waiting on a corner to "watch for the car out a window" (despite not knowing what the car exactly looks like beyond "it's silver" and not telling the driver they were doing so). the driver does not have a cell phone.

so the driver drove back and forth on 95th for a while and couldn't' find them. at this point it was 8am and I had been standing on the corner of 88th for 45 minutes (in the freezing cold. not going inside like a puss) waiting.

the driver decided to loop down and get me and the girl i was waiting with and maybe come back to 95th. she is not an experienced driver, however, and made the regrettable decision to turn around by looping up to 96th street.

96th street is "the barrier". as she turned onto it, she was stopped by police and forbidden to travel back southward without four people in her car.

several pay phone calls to our various schools and different peoples' cell phones later, we arranged to walk up to 98th and lex and meet her. we all did. and arrived to find she had invited a japanese man to come with us. the backseat isn't really big enough for 3 and we had 6 people total, so we ended up sitting on laps of strangers and all smushed together.

worse, since it was now approaching 9am, we were dead in the middle of rush traffic. it took more than 2 more hours to get down to chinatown (At one point we went two blocks in forty minutes).

all in all, i got out there at 7:15 and got to school at 11:00am. jesus.

tomorrow, the driver decrees, everyone's meeting at 88th and anyone not there at 7:30 is hitching.

plus side: i found 20 bucks on the ground while waiting in the freezing cold!
 
oh yeh the japanese guy was only with us for about an hour of that. as we crawled southward, he kept rolling down the window or getting out and shouting at passing cars "you going south! can you take me!" and finally at like 59th street someone nodded and he jumped out of our car as we drove and ran to the parallel SUV (also as it drove) and leapt in.
 
there are tons of pics online. maybe i will bring my camera tomorrow and see if i can get any shots. my quotidian energy is taken up by the crazy commutes and messed-up workday, though.
 
this strike absolutely MUST END. i can't stand this begging of car rides from people thing. it's driving me fucking NUTS.
 
the japanese guy was just sick of sitting on a beefy woman's lap and having one of his legs, in turn, sat on by another woman. both strangers.

simon, I don't want a blog so much, but just a place where I can maybe upload my show photos and have, I guess, lyrics or something.