Goodnight, sleep tight.

The first piece I sold to a "real" publication was about a flea infestation I inadvertently started in our house. A few flea bombs later, and peace was restored. Problems aren't as easy to solve in New York City, however, and the bedbug epidemic here is getting fierce.

Disclaimer: my apartment does not have bedbugs. At least, I don't think it does. Eddie told me the other day that some people have them and don't know it because they're not allergic to the bites. This could be hearsay, or it could be the truth – either way, I'm not itchy and haven’t seen any crawling around. Dave and I bought all of our upholstered furniture new, so in that sense we're safe.

Still, you never know. A movie theater in Times Square was closed recently because of a tribe of bedbugs that had taken over its seats. I heard rumors that a downtown Victoria's Secret had to close its doors for the same reason. More and more chairs and mattresses encased in plastic bags and layers of tape and bearing handwritten "Bedbugs" signs are appearing on sidewalks. I saw some beautiful wooden furniture out for trash pick-up the other day, with an affixed note proclaiming that it was all free but that the apartment had bedbugs.

This is not the beautiful wooden furniture I mentioned - I failed to photograph it - but rather a picture I took from Google.

Apparently they can jump from one person to another, from someone's purse into yours… Pretty scary. I have no idea how hard they are to get rid of, but I'm guessing that it must be no walk in the park if people are panicking so much. The New York Times ran an article recently about the social ostracization that a bedbug infestation will earn you. Say goodbye to party invitations and lunch dates. One woman says that she crosses the street if she sees any furniture on the curb at all. I can picture her zig-zagging all over Manhattan, because there's furniture out for disposal everywhere. She's probably doubling her transit times.

So wish me luck, friends. And if you can get a good deal on a sturdy biohazard suit, let me know.

It's an ill wind...

...that blows my umbrella budget no good.

At my going-away party last summer, the SPS staff, headed by Kathy B., gave me a goodie bag full of useful (hand sanitizer and Starbucks gift cards) and not-so-useful (a mini-bullhorn which makes the speaker's voice sound like a robot, the better to attract the attention of cabbies) things to use in the city. My favorite item in the bag was a checkered umbrella which kept me at least marginally dry for almost exactly a year. I was sorry to realize after returning home from Eddie's show last week that I had left it under my chair.

I bought a soulless black one to replace it last week and owned it for exactly four days before taking it out today to shield me from the driving rain that's been falling on us for two days now. Alas, the driving rain has been accompanied by wind, sometimes consistently strong and sometimes occurring in unexpected, powerful bursts. It was just such a burst that caused the damage you see below to my "new" umbrella:

To my horror, the shaft bent and then the canopy above flipped inside out. I was able to right it pretty easily, but the damage to the shaft was done, and with each wiggle it eroded more and more until the handle fell off completely. Sigh. Luckily I was able to use the top part for a few more hours until I had a free moment to purchase a replacement (my second one this week). It is blue, and I can only hope more resilient.

Tour de Manhattan

As I mentioned last week, this Saturday was the final Summer Streets day, and I headed out at 10:30 to bike to the start of the route, then ride the whole thing down and back. It was sunny, breezy, and not too hot - a perfect day for a ride!

The route started at 72nd Street, and I got there by going through part of Central Park. It was even more crowded than the last time I went, so much so that even without cars I still had to deal with gridlock and bottlenecks. The soundtrack along the way was provided by a guy skateboarding back and forth with a boom box blasting "Barbara Ann," someone playing an accordion on a corner, a free Zumba class set up on a side street, a radio station doing a promo broadcast, several amateur a capella whistlers, and lots of snippets of conversation. I saw the same lemonade stands, product promotion tents, and free bike/roller blade repair spots as there were last week. The lines for bike rental places were consistently about 40 people deep.

This photo was taken from my bike! This was my first (and maybe last) foray into mounted photography.

Running into someone I recognize around the city is always a very startling experience. I have seen the same woman several times running around Central Park, whom I recognize because she has the weirdest stride I've ever seen, but other than that, I don't usually see perfect strangers multiple times. The odds are against it, given the sheer number of people pouring through every sidewalk, intersection, and coffee shop around the clock. I did, however, recognize the guy below from every New York race I've run:

He's rather hard to miss. Sorry about the poor picture quality - my camera seems to be protesting the last time I dropped it. If you can't tell, he is a very short, very thin Asian man with a flowing white beard and massive dreadlocks piled on top of his head in a sort of netting. He always wears the same sunglasses, jersey, and shorts and has the same tape around his knees, although this is the first time I've seen him holding jingle bells on route. It was tough to get a picture of him without his noticing. As I say, I've seen him in every Road Runners race, but this is the first time I've spotted him in a non-competitive event. It was rather exciting.

Urban tennis?

Another picture my camera chose not to capture vividly depicts the game of tennis I saw set up in an alley. The net was made of that orange webbing they put around construction sites and was held up by two of those standing wire baskets that allow you both pick up tennis balls and then access them easily by rotating the basket handles to the bottom. I thought it was pretty creative, and logical when you consider the cost/wait times required to use real courts in this city.

The route closed at 1:00, by which time I was safely back within the confines of the car-free Central Park. Altogether, the round trip was 15 miles, and was really a fun experience. No sign, I'm sorry to say, of the dumpster pools.

Premium Rush

Yesterday, I was rocking out to a badass song on my iPod as I walked home from a club (ok, ok, I was listening to a lecture on my BlackBerry on the way home from the grocery store), when an attractive black guy in a bright yellow t-shirt said, "Excuse me, miss..." He had a businesslike air, so I didn't think it likely that he was going to flirt with me. But he didn't look like the kind of guy who'd ask me for a dollar either - he was both clean cut and, well, clean. Curious, I pulled out an ear bud. "You can't cross Amsterdam," he said, "they're shooting a movie." I glanced up and down the street and, sure enough, most auto traffic had come to a halt. He told me that I could wait a few minutes - the "rig" would be by shortly - or else walk two blocks down and cross there. Naturally, after a slightly guilty thought about the heat of the day and the container of yogurt in my shopping bag, I decided to stay and watch.

Turns out, this wasn't a very monumental decision, because the "shot" was over in literally seconds. I had scarcely found a spot to stand in the shade a few feet from the intersection when the traffic suddenly picked up and a truck with a camera, a huge reflector screen, several spotlights, and one of those big fuzzy mics protruding from it went by at about 35 MPH. Alongside the rig, was another truck hitched to a full-sized tricycle, and on the tricycle was an actress I didn't recognize. She was staring straight ahead as she "rode," illuminated with artificial lighting even more than anyone else on the street at noon, and yelling some line which I couldn't quite catch. And then they were gone.

The guy in the yellow shirt looked up and down the street so I did too, and I noticed for the first time several other people in yellow shirts stationed in various places along Amsterdam. All of them were good-looking. My guy muttered a few things into his headset, then said, "Cut," and motioned that I could be on my way. The movie, he told me as I was leaving, was going to be called "Premium Rush." I learned via a quick Internet search at home that the movie, which will come out in 2011, is "a fast-paced action story about a New York City bike messenger who is pursued by a dirty cop." It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, fresh from his work on "Inception" which recently rocked box offices. Alas, based on what I've read about the movie, he may be sinking back into mediocrity with this project. It's likely that the scene I saw filmed is likely to be the only part of this movie I'll see.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt working on another scene somewhere else in the city.

My Fantastically Talented Friends

My friend Eddie comes from a pretty amazing family. His dad is an actor and singer and won a Tony award for some play he was in on Broadway. He continues to perform on and off Broadway and around the country. His sister Lily was in the original cast of "Spring Awakening," another Tony winner (the musical, not Lily herself). He and his brother Alex are pretty spectacular themselves, but a bit less driven than Lily is. On Monday night, the three of them did a show at a really cool venue called Joe's Pub in the Village.

My friend Julia has been there to see other things before, and she told me it's a pretty major spot for Broadway actors to do shows on the side. This is not a place for full-on plays, but for concerts and showcases. Dave, Julia, and I went to see the Cooper clan, and they were absolutely great. They performed with a live band, full lighting, the works!

Eddie, Lily, and Alex

I'd never heard the song Eddie sang before (see below for a video link) and I thought it was hilarious. He has great stage presence. It's interesting hearing him sing alongside Lily and Alex. All three of them are really talented, but Eddie has had lots of musical theater training, and it shows. Both Lily and Alex sound more contemporary, whereas Eddie sounds like he should be wearing suspenders and shaking spirit fingers at the end of big numbers.

The show was great, but I enjoyed what went on in the house just as much as what was onstage. The whole place was sold out, and it seemed that everyone there was a friend or family member of at least one of the Coopers. I've never been part of a more enthusiastic audience. It was fun to watch the three of them being hugged, congratulated, photographed, and presented with flowers after the show, and we all went to a bar down the street for a celebratory drink afterwards. Eddie's friends are becoming my friends, which is great in a lot of ways, but it means I almost always have to leave the party just as it's getting started; most of them are actors, and are "loosely employed."

Click here for a video of: Eddie's song

Click here for the "unexpected" encore: All three Coopers

Bronx Half - Four of Five!

At 5:00 this morning I rolled out of bed, toasted a mini bagel, dragged on my clothes, and headed to the subway station still chewing. I didn't think it would take me that long to get to the appointed stop near the starting line, but trains run far less frequently in the mornings, and there are no express trains at that hour. As it was, I ended up sitting on the platform for about 20 minutes before a train arrived, but I made it in plenty of time to check my bag.

The weather this morning was overcast and much cooler - still a tad humid, but not too bad - making this one infinitely more pleasant than Queens. I didn't bring my iPod, thinking I wouldn't need the distraction, and I'm glad it stayed at home. I haven't been hitting training as hard lately because I figured both summer races were going to be lost causes anyway because of the heat, and I regretted that today. My final time, 1:49:40, was five minutes slower than my PR, and I think I could have gotten a lot closer to it if I'd put in the workouts I should have. Nonetheless, it wasn't a terrible performance, and the course was pretty hilly which hurt me as well. I felt great during the first six miles or so and was sort of surprised by how quick my pace was, but I slowed much more than I would have liked for the last four or so miles - not the even performance I try for. The PowerBar gel I swallowed halfway through the race gave me a stomachache as well, making me wish I'd taken the advice I always dish out to other people about never trying anything new on race day.

Notable sights were few, but they included a guy running with a small video camera clipped to the visor of his hat (I wondered who he was going to subject the video to after the race; I love running, but watching a half-marathon from the perspective of a runner promises to be dry material) and a guy sitting at a bus stop, smoking a cigarette and watching the runners go by in a blood-soaked t-shirt. Only in the Bronx...

Rather than a play-by-play of the race - I don't want to be compared to Video Camera Guy - I've decided to report in a different format this time:

What I Like About Racing (in no particular order)

-The electricity in the air before the start and during the first half mile

-Cheering fans

-Fans who offer high fives

-Clever signs and t-shirts to read along the way

-Heading for the starting line from the subway in a tide of other runners; there's an incredible sense of camaraderie, even if I don't talk to anyone

-Looking for the highest/lowest bib numbers - today's were 51 and something in the high 7,000's

-Passing men

-Passing people wearing overly technical running gear or t-shirts that proclaim them finishers of various hardcore competitions like ultra-marathons or Ironman competitions

-Cheering for the first woman runner, who usually laps me somewhere around Mile 4.

-Seeing runners recognize someone they know, either a fan or a fellow runner

-Eavesdropping on other runners' conversations

-Thinking about what I'll write on my blog (really!)

-Finishing

-Sending a text message to a list of family/friends to let them know I'm done

I've got two more races planned: the Diva Half on Long Island and the Staten Island Half, on consecutive weekends in October. Supposedly, Dave's friend Kat wants to run the Diva Half with me, which I will believe when she meets me at the train station the morning of. My chain-smoking Spanish friend wants to train for and run the Staten Island Half with me as well, and based on my performance the last time I tried to run two in a row, I think he may actually be able to stay with me if he puts in any kind of training at all; I've run with him once before, and what he lacks in talent/physical fitness (a lot) he makes up for in stubbornness (even more). I'm looking to go after my PR of 1:44 in Long Island, which is flat and should see cooler weather than my last four races, so I've got a lot of training and excitement to look forward to. The Staten Island race will be notable for another reason, even if my time is slow (which it is likely to be): it will mean that I've met my goal of running a half-marathon in each of the boroughs!

Summer Streets

On Yom Kippur in Israel, no motor vehicles are allowed in the streets from sundown to the following sundown and everyone sets out to walk through some of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. Kids sit in the middle of the road with sidewalk chalk. Elderly people hobble along with canes. It's a pretty cool sight to behold, and I wonder if someone had that in mind when they planned the first Summer Streets days here in New York. This year marks the third series they've held, and for the sake of all New Yorkers I hope it remains as solid a tradition as Yom Kippur is in Israel.

For three Saturdays in August, a seven-mile stretch of road, starting at the base of Central Park and ending at the Brooklyn Bridge, is closed to auto traffic. I happened to hear about this from a fellow runner I randomly met at a cafe last night. She was planning a morning run through the streets, but since the Bronx Half is tomorrow and I'm tapering (this is my favorite part of training), I decided to just go for a walk instead.

This is the first lemonade stand I've seen since I moved here! Lemonade and chocolate chip cookies cost a dollar each, and a sign said that all proceeds would go to Autism Speaks. The girl seemed to be doing a pretty brisk business.

Most of the people taking advantage of the lack of traffic seemed to be cyclists. There were tons of them out, riding every kind of bike you can imagine, some ambling along, others zipping in and out of slower-moving traffic. Every few blocks there was a huge banner advertising the free exercise classes that would be available throughout the day and where they would be held. I read about dumpster pools (seriously, they fill dumpsters with water...) and a picnic area sponsored by Whole Foods. Along the sides of the road here and there were information booths for bike clubs and gyms. One radio station had speakers blaring out music on a corner. Most cross traffic, except for on a few major streets, was completely closed, meaning that you could walk/run/ride/rollerblade almost entirely uninterrupted through areas like midtown, SoHo, and Chinatown where that's usually nothing more than a pipe dream.

It was a pretty cool scene, and I was sorry to be able to see only part of it. But next weekend I'm planning to bike down to the start at Central Park and ride the whole thing. Stay tuned for pictures of dumpster pools.

Money + Google hits = Silver Lining

I'm really glad I was a recipient of the Zankel Fellowship. Although it was a pain to go all the way out to Heritage and I often ended up feeling sort of depressed about the state of education, welfare, today's inner city youth, etc., I learned a lot. And it payed for a sizable chunk of my tuition as well. (This year, alas, I was not eligible to reapply because fellows have to be full-time students for a year, and I'll be done in-glory hallelujah-December.)

Another perk, it turns out, is that some pretty sweet results appear when one Googles my name. I like to check Google periodically to see what's out there - you never know when some friend of yours may use poor judgement about publicly posting a picture of you for the world to see. I've heard that many employers Google applicants as part of the hiring process as well. The article I wrote for The Jerusalem Post usually appears a few times, and there are a smattering of race times as well. I'm tagged in a picture of the Honduras medical mission team, and my name is also flagged in the St. Paul's Summer School catalogue from 2009.

And lately I've got these two hits:

TC Today

-In this one, Jill and I are prominently featured on page 54 in a short article accompanied by a terrible picture.

Ed Blog: Zankel Booklet

-Jill and I are similarly prominent in this one (scroll to the very, very end of the document) but look much better in the picture.

Ah, fame.

Shakespeare in the Park(ing Lot)

Shakespeare in the Park is a New York tradition. Most days of the week in summer, people line up starting at 6:00 A.M. to wait in line for free tickets to one of two of the season's shows (this year, they performed "Winter's Tale" and "The Merchant of Venice"). As ticket distribution doesn't actually begin until 1:00 P.M., I chose to bypass this step and try my luck in the online lottery; all one has to do is sign up each day there is a performance and hope for the best. Alas, I started late and I didn't win tickets for either show. So I was pleased when my friend Julia emailed me about another way to see Shakespeare for free. A troupe called Drilling Company Theater would be performing "Julius Caesar," also for free, although we wouldn't be heading to idyllic Central Park to see it. We headed, instead, to a parking lot in Chinatown.

I have no idea what drilling has to do with Shakespeare, but whatever the connection, I fully support it. The show was fantastic and I remained absorbed nearly the whole way through. (My only complaint is that there was no intermission during the 2 1/2-hour long play, although I'm not sure where they would have put it as the play gains momentum with each scene.) We arrived to a ring of plastic chairs surrounding an open area with a small platform in the center. People trickled in until nearly all the chairs were full (there was standing room only by the time the performance was in full swing), and while we waited for the play to begin, actors occasionally marched, chanting, across the stage with signs that said things like "Keep Julius Caesar out of our schools!" There were lots of other modern touches: half of the actors were female and all of them wore modern clothing (Cassius was played by a badass chick in a power suit), when Caesar was stabbed to death his assailants wielded office implements rather than swords, and Cassius and Brutus plotted with the help of a flip chart which outlined possible courses of action. The Soothsayer wore aviator sunglasses and smoked a cigarette while lounging against a street light. Other aspects of modernity were present as well. Now and then, an actor's words would be drowned out by a siren in the distance. The stage was illuminated by headlights as cars entered the parking lot. Despite these reminders that we were not in the Globe, each word of the original play was intact. This was not a contemporary interpretation, but the real thing.

The actors, all of whom I think are volunteers, were superb. Most were young and hip-looking, which is not the way I'd usually describe a Shakespearean actor. The role of Cassius was played better than I've ever seen it, and Marc Antony was great as well. Julia and I ended up in the front row, and we were feet away from the action the whole time. It was great to be able to appreciate the subtle expressions on the actors' faces. I had to teach "Julius Caesar" when I was at McGavock and it wasn't a great experience - the kids weren't that into it. This time, however, I loved it.

After the show, Julia told me that she got a little obsessed with Roman history after reading the play for the first time and regaled me with information about the real Marc Antony, about Caesar's successor, Octavius, and other interesting facts. We made plans to throw an Ides of March toga party on March 15th, and she told me that she and her friends once threw a "Twelfth Night" party on Twelfth Night during which they wore costumes, read the play aloud, and did a shot after each scene. Julia is my kind of girl.

It's a Shore Thing

Apologies for the terrible pun - I couldn't resist.

This past weekend consisted of a series of weird connections that all fell together to create a great time. In other words, I had a blast.

Chris, a friend of mine from Visalia, was in NYC for the week as part of an east coast trip he's on. He's a runner and he emailed me to ask about some good running routes in the city, and we ended up meeting twice to run along the Hudson and around Central Park. He told me that his cousin Justin had moved to Long Island with his wife about a year and a half ago and that they were planning a beach trip on Saturday. I'd met Justin and his brother, Evan, once before, and Chris invited me to crash the trip and join them. I was more than happy to do it.

On Saturday morning, Chris and I found ourselves part of a large crowd of other beach-goers in Penn Station. The Long Island Rail Road has several routes, and there's a signboard with the names of the trains and the schedule up above the tracks. That part was straightforward enough, but it turns out that the track number appears just a few minutes before the train is scheduled to depart, presumably because no one knows which track it will arrive on until it actually arrives. After excessive commentary on the stupidity of this system (mostly from me - Chris is more merciful), we resigned ourselves to gazing upward at the name of the train we planned to take. I kept wishing I had the forthrightness to take a picture of the crowd, all staring blankly in the same direction. Another train's track lit up before ours did, and about half of the crowd immediately woke from the spell and hurried off towards the platform. Ours, too, was announced after a few more minutes, and we dashed off for the track, jockeying for position and ending up with pretty good window seats. The LIRR is clean, comfortable, and relatively fast. It was outside the urban sprawl pretty quickly, leaving us with about 40 minutes' worth of beautiful green countryside before we pulled into Huntington, the final stop. Justin and Evan (who lives in DC but was visiting for the weekend) picked us up, and we headed beachward to meet up with Marli, Justin's wife, and some friends of theirs.

We couldn't have asked for a better day for the beach, or "the shore" as New Yorkers call it. It was clear and sunny, but not too hot for what seemed like the first time in ages. It was more crowded than I've ever seen a beach, but we were told that it was a pretty small showing. We lounged, ate lunch, swam in water that would have been far more pleasant had Justin not told us about the 18-foot great white shark that had washed up recently, then lounged some more. On a walk down the beach I found the broken bottom of a beer bottle, a dead horseshoe crab, lots of giant clamshells, and countless strands of seaweed that were infatuated with my ankles. There weren't really waves to speak of, and what little there were broke just before hitting the edge of the sand, so no one was boogie boarding or surfing. Justin (or was it Evan?) observed that in California, people tend to go to the beach to do things, whereas on Long Island people go to be seen. Judging by the umber pelts of the sunbathers all around us, Long Islanders like to be seen a lot. Were it not for Elena, Marli's fair-skinned friend, I'd have felt very out of place.

Five planes wrote this message - a Geico ad - by flying in tight formation and emitting a small cloud of smoke in unison at intervals to form the letters. I'd never seen anything like it before.

We followed our beach trip with showers at Justin and Marli's house and dinner at Elena and her husband Adam's house. It was unusually thrilling to ride in a car that wasn't a cab, help serve food in a full-sized kitchen, play with pet dogs in a back yard, and sit on a porch swing. Much as I love my life in New York City, I have missed these things. I'm not sure I'll be able to get in another beach trip this summer, but next year I'm going to start early.

American Idiot

The most recent discounted Broadway tickets available through TC were for a show called American Idiot. It's based on a rock/punk album of the same name by Green Day (with tracks from the following album as well) and the band was heavily involved in planning the show. American Idiot is one of my favorite albums, and so I was excited to see the show, even more so because the leading actor was in Spring Awakening, a show that I saw twice and loved before it went off Broadway.

The theater was absolutely packed. Music was played by a rock band that stayed onstage the whole time, and by several of the actors accompanying themselves on acoustic guitars occasionally when the plot called for it. My seat was pretty far back, but it was dead center and I could see quite well.

I won't say it was the best show I've ever seen, but I really enjoyed it. It was fun to know just about every word to every song, and I had to stop myself from singing along. The album definitely has a story behind it, but seeing the musical defined the story much better for me, so I think I'll listen to it now with a clearer picture of what the band was trying to say. After the curtain call, the curtain went down and then came back up a few seconds later. Each member of the cast, 20 of them, held an acoustic guitar, and in unison they played one more Green Day song before heading offstage. I've never heard that many guitars at one time before, and the effect was pretty cool, although I found myself wondering how many of them had to learn to play in their spare time after rehearsals so they could pull of the curtain call.

Hail to the chief

The other day, at about 4:00 in the afternoon, I was biking home from lunch with two Cate classmates of mine. I was headed north along the western edge of Central Park and was in a bit of a hurry because I had to get home, collect my tutoring stuff, then head down to the lower East Side by 5:30. Cars were bumper to bumper, and one guy had actually gotten out of his cab to peer ahead, apparently in hopes of determining how backed up traffic was. "Suckers," I thought, as I whizzed by them.

Hubris, I discovered, is a bitch. Two blocks later, I came upon a roadblock for pedestrians, and, yes, cyclists. There was metal fencing up, blocking both the road and the sidewalk, and an ever-growing crowd of people was clustered there, flashing lights from about ten emergency vehicles crazily illuminating their faces. A very surly cop monitored pedestrian activity from the center of the street, and every time someone set a toe into the gutter, he bellowed at them to stay on the sidewalk.

After I'd satisfied myself that there was no way around this, I inquired of a baby-faced gay man next to me what the deal was. "We think it's the president," he said. Obama was apparently in the city somewhere, and the huge lengths that had been taken to block off the street seemed to have no other explanation. A helicopter flying overhead, cinched it: this had to be in anticipation of Obama's passing through.

It was hot, and the sidewalk was crowded. I had worked up a sheen of sweat from riding, and was thirsty. I was also aware that every second I wasn't moving forward increased the odds that I'd be late for my appointment. But I figured that being held up by the presidential motorcade was a good excuse. Plus, I was excited. I hoped I'd be able to glimpse even just his profile as he rode by.

Silly me. I don't know much about the security measures involved when the president moves from Point A to Point B. When, after 15 minutes, the motorcade finally appeared, it was led by something like 10 cops on motorcycles. Then a stream of police cars, ambulances, a tow truck (?), sleek black SUVs with tinted windows, and sleek black sedans with tinted windows went by at about 35 MPH. The presidential limos, two of them, were sandwiched in the middle. People gasped and a few clapped as they sped past us. I was so intent on photographing them with the camera on my BlackBerry that I hardly even saw them. They were simple, classy, and black, and had small flags flapping on either side of the hood. Because of my glacially slow shutter speed, this is the thrilling image I was able to capture:

The limos were already out of sight before my BlackBerry was able to store the image...

The limos were followed by another stream of vehicles like the one that had preceded it, minus the tow truck, and was completely past us in less than a minute. The metal fencing was moved, and people went on their way. It took longer for the cars to get back on the road than it took me, and so I had the luxury of riding with the absolute certainly that I wasn't about to be flattened by a cab for a few blissful blocks. I called Dave on the way home from my tutoring appointment (for which I was on time, after all) to tell him about my adventure, and that evening when I got home he said he'd been delayed on the East Side for the same reason.

I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that security surrounding the president is so extreme, but it sort of did anyway. Stopping all traffic for 20 minutes in the middle of Manhattan is no small task, and can't have been cheap for the city to do. I know it would have defeated the purpose if he had, but I still wish Obama had rolled down a window and waved at us as he went by.

Weekend in D.C.

To my delight, my dear friend Virginia, a friend from Cate, moved to D.C. about a month ago with her new husband, Jorge, whom she met while she was working in Colombia. Virginia used to live in San Francisco, so when I was in California I'd see her sometimes, but since my move to New York I hadn't seen her at all. She didn't go to Camp Cate because she'd gotten married the weekend before and was en route to D.C. by car, so I was excited when our schedules lined up so that it would work out for me to spend the weekend in D.C. with her.

The Bolt, the bus I usually take to Boston, also goes to D.C., so it was a snap to get down there, and I took the Metro out to Virginia's neighborhood with no difficulty at all. I used to go to D.C. at least once a year to watch Anthony play water polo when he was in college, but we stuck around the George Washington area mostly. While I liked seeing him, I wasn't a huge fan of the city. But Virginia lives in an area called Columbia Heights, which I liked very much. We made dinner and chatted until bedtime, then headed to a nearby farmers' market the next morning while Jorge cooked a Colombian breakfast for us of arepas and scrambled eggs with corn, tomatoes, and onions. It was delicious, and we had a great conversation about international current events; Virginia is a big fan of The Economist. We went on a hike around a nearby park in the afternoon, then took showers back at her apartment before onces, which is sort of like a Latin American teatime during which we drank tea, ate muffins, and talked about Spanish prepositions (which was actually fascinating). Then we had dinner at a Peruvian restaurant.

As luck would have it, when I called my brother for his birthday last week, I mentioned that I was going to be in D.C. this weekend and he said that he and Jane had the same plan. Further, not only was he also staying in Columbia Heights, his friend's house turned out to be two blocks from Virginia and Jorge's apartment. We met them for drinks after dinner and had a great time. I met two of Anthony and Jane's friends who used to work with Jane at a law firm in D.C. and they were great. Virginia and Jorge begged out early, as they had a yoga class in the morning, but they gave me a key to their place and so I got to stay out with Anthony's crew until quite late.

The next morning, Virginia and Jorge headed to their yoga class and I headed to DuPont Circle to meet my friend Shannon. Shannon and I met in second grade when she started at St. Paul's. I hadn't seen her for a few years, but we had a great brunch and I'm hoping to see more of her now that we've reconnected. Her brother lives in New York, so that's further incentive for us to cross paths during my remaining year on the east coast.

Now that Anthony and Jane will be moving away from Boston, I think I'll make fewer weekend trips there. D.C. may be a nice alternative destination.