THBBBGHT.

Got up today. Sleep was good. Mom suggested I ought to go to Long Island & visit Grandma as she had a bad week. I figured sure, was going into city anyway- maybe after that. Said I'd take the LIRR to the station in the town where Grandma lives. Mom said probably not wise as this meant taking LIRR back to Penn Station at night & safety maybe not best. Take car to Hoboken, leave car there for city trip (parking way cheaper), then get car out of Hoboken and drive to LI, sez I. Sure, sez Mom. In fact, take Holland Tunnel to city, take Canal Street, cross bridge, get on BQE and ride to Belt Parkway, thence to Southern State. V. little traffic there in late afternoons...

This is how day ACTUALLY went.

Drove to Hoboken. Put car in parking garage. Took PATH train to city.
Bought campaign hat at Kaufman's Army and Navy. Will be playing Mountie character in RPG on Wednesday, wanted hat.
Took train to Chinatown. Was confronted with extremely unenthusiastic, angry woman on train claiming to be homeless & having no place to go during day and could we give her money to help her family. Did not give her money as she set off all kinds of angry-making bells that had been set by the guy on the train on Sunday. Also, have come to feel that people who rage at fellow train riders because they are not poor, and who say 'thank you for letting me TALK TO MYSELF' as if they are trying to induce guilt, are probably not to be rewarded or they will keep using nasty tactics. Was thinking fraudulent case there anyway... Bought new purse, tai chi slippers. Also sesame bubble tea at Tea & Tea on Mott Street. Spent $10 total on new purse and slippers.
Took train back up to 23rd street, got out, walked to PATH. Got on PATH train to Hoboken.
Discovered disturbing lack of car keys on PATH train.
Phoned Kaufman's. No keys there. Tried chasing down phone #s for places I stopped in Chinatown - no luck, did not have building addresses & could not pin down right numbers. bah.
Took train back to home town. Got extra key there. This is an hour's ride.
Took train back to Hoboken. Ripped out 2 in. of knitting I did on new sock as I had bollixed up pattern.
Got off train in Hoboken. Went to CVS to buy small item and get $20 back from debit card as is more rewarding & less fee-laden than using ATM. 2 homeless guys outside CVS. Gave one a buck, the other was eating and did not seem to have a cup out for money. Guy I have the dollar to thanked me.
Came out of CVS. Had $20, some extra dollars in pocket, bag of diabetic death nuggets (Goetze's Caramel Creams). Asked homeless guy I'd given the buck to if he wanted some candy; when he said yes, opened bag, gave him three nuggets (bag had something like 12 in it). He said too many, I told him nonsense, he smiled. Homeless guy with soup looked up and held out hand, so I gave him a buck and three more nuggets; he looked down at his hand, looked up, and said, "Thanks, kid." I nearly cried w/gratitude for nice homeless people instead of mean ones.
Got back to car. Found keys on front seat. Had deliberately moved them on getting out of car as had thought 'hmm, I'll forget them if not careful'. Argh. Left pkg. garage at 5:50 or so.
Drove into city. Tunnel traffic awful.
Canal Street traffic awful.
Manhattan Bridge - no traffic but something made my eyes sting HARD and spent most of drive w/one eye shut and other watering furiously. Wiped eyes once off bridge as needed to stop car to do that.
BQE to Belt Pkwy? Two separate traffic jams each taking up something like 20 min. for a space that should have been traversed in 5, tops. One in area where there had been an accident but no evidence remained save for much shattered glass. For what it's worth, in evening sunlight it was really pretty sparkling shattered glass... but so much of it that either someone was hurt very badly, or a truck transporting glass lost several sheets.
Belt Pkwy to Southern State? Jammed clear to Hell and back. Noses to derrieres as far as the eye can see.
Southern State? Only one jam, near beginning.
Got to Long Island town at eight PM - remember, I left around six. This drive should not have taken more than 45 minutes.
Hung out w/Grandma and Aunt K. and my grandfather, who has advanced Alzheimer's disease, for several hours. They had known I was coming, so there was a burger waiting for me; Aunt K. heated it up as the drive had been Too Fecking Long. We wound up watching a Judy Garland movie, The Harvey Girls. Tried like hell to remember name of the actor who played Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz, as I had recognised him in the movie. (Ray Bolger.) Grandma tried to talk me into sleeping over. Did not, as wanted to get home.
Southern State Pkwy jammed IMMEDIATELY upon getting onto road. !*&()&*)!
Cross Island, fortunately, not jammed. Neither was Grand Central Pkwy, nor Triboro Bridge, nor Harlem River Drive. Nor even George Washington Bridge or Garden State Pkwy. Finally got home around 1 AM, having left at 11. Drive at least half an hour too long.

hence, THBBBGHT.

oh well. At least I have the hat.

Random things I feel like mentioning,

mostly because Aunt K. gave me a cup with around 18 oz. of orange-tinted MOuntain Dew for the ride home (I refused coffee) and it hasn't worn off yet...

Big-ass shark in Finding Nemo is named Bruce. Thought this was because Bruce was Australian - cf. Monty Python Australian Philosophers Sketch. Only later did I realise that big-ass robot shark used in Jaws movies was called Bruce by movie crew and so this was probably homage. durh.

There is a stretch of the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan labeled '369th Div- Harlem Hellfighters Highway'. Finally got off arse and looked up this name on Web. According to the History Channel documentary on the subject (and a lot of other places too), they were " the 369th Infantry Regiment of the New York National Guard 15 Regiment. An all African American unit, the 369th fought in World War I under the French Flag because the United States refused to have African American soldiers in combat. The 369th compiled an astounding war record and were decorated by the French government. But when they returned home to the United States, they were subjected to the racism of the era, and discovered their service in World War I meant nothing to their fellow Americans. Harlem Hellfighters would be useful for classes on African American History, American History, European History, Cultural History and civics. It is appropriate for middle school and high school." One of 'em, Sgt. Henry Johnson, was the first American to win the Croix de Guerre. Go Sgt. Johnson!

Was expecting them to be some kind of air unit or something a la Flying Tigers. Was hoping to be able to appropriate the name for background material in RPG or novel or something, but would rather not sully name of really cool group by insufficiently respectful use.

I think I ran into two buskers I have seen on the subway before. One doesn't usually see erhu players, so guys who do that stand out. And how many basso Chinese guys who sing opera- we're talkin' Verdi, here- and the Ave Maria can there be? I gave 'em a buck each. Buskers are cool.

I think that's about it. I'm starting to yawn; I guess the soda has worn off. T'care...

(no subject)

Home, awake, alone, relaxed, and pondering lunch; that's me just now. I got home last night and got to sleep somewhere after 2:30 AM. A telemarketer's call awakened me around 11- at least I assume it was such, since I picked up the phone and got a recording saying 'please hold for an important message'. Here's a clue, folks: if your message is important, you can spare a human being to make the call. My father has gone off to Appalachia to work with his parish's poverty relief trip for a week, and my mother and sister are off to visit my grandmother on Long Island - yes, the one of yesterday's many journeys and travails. I slept well, I have little tension today, and after the time I spent reading and praying and thinking in a local park, all seems to have come around and become well. Well, except for my stomach, as my guts are currently unhappy with something they cannot quite place, save that they want to be rid of it- but otherwise all is well.

Yesterday's driving did have its good points. I prefer the train for the most part, because then I do not have to drive. I can knit, read, sleep, eat, or do what I like. Yes, I am not in control - but being in control means being responsible, and that requires dedication to your task. Sometimes I would rather let go of that so as to be free while I travel. Yesterday's driving, however, gave me a few shining moments, all circled around the same theme: engineers... see, I took the Pulaski Skyway from interstate 78 to Hoboken, rather than the Jersey Turnpike. I didn't much want to deal with tollbooths, and the Skyway speed limit, while lower than the Turnpike's, is still entirely reasonable. The Skyway is also a U.S. highway, and I have always trusted those more than interstates for some reason. So, as I have done more than a few times of late, I drove along the Skyway through northern industrial NJ.

They call it the Skyway for a reason. I'm not sure I've ever seen a highway lifted that far off the ground. You can see the Skyway's form for miles from other roads or from buildings - it runs through all kinds of territory before depositing the people aboard onto the ground again. It's high, it's two lanes in either direction, it's carefully fenced with concrete and steel. It features several bridge spans with all kinds of structural struts and arches, and yesterday it suddenly struck me that it was possibly the most magnificent thing I had yet seen that day. Somewhere in the past there was an engineer, or two or five or ten or a hundred, who had designed the thing. Somewhere in years gone by men (and possibly women - I do not know how old the Skyway is, it may date from 2oth century times when women were not called on much for engineering skills) sat around tables and worked out diagrams, worked out numbers, and said 'these will do'. There were equations, forces, constants, material stresses, strengths, weaknesses, surveys, soundings of the ground; a hundred thousand things checked and rechecked and designed over and over again before being put into place. Somewhere in the past there lay people who had brought into being this long, vast, high thing that no one had ever seen in that place before - that none of the land's original inhabitants might ever have imagined. The road they built ran through the air so high that only birds and wildfire might ever have reached so high, once. It stood up to time and rain and forces, and though it might have shaken now and again it did not break or fall. There were people who understood numbers and people who understood metal and people who understood stone and people who understood hard, hard work, and together they built the thing and made it possible to ride through the air without so much as ever leaving the ground.

A similar thought occurred to me when I crossed into Queens - for some reason I did not think on the engineers when I entered the Holland Tunnel. That may have been due to the incredible traffic back-up. When it came to the Manhattan Bridge, though, that was something else again... that's a suspension bridge, built with multiple roadways and with space allocated for subway trains. Imagine the minds it must have taken to put together the numbers needed to form those cables! People all over the world had seen those numbers, had made things of them - suspension bridges in the Inca lands being some of the earliest. Here, now, there was a bridge and an old one at that, one that was sunk on piles in the bed of a river and held in the air by great cables bolted at one end and anchored at the other. The arcs of the main cables and the straight drops of the lesser ones were any teacher's answer to 'why do I need math in the real world, anyway?'. It stood and it held, and though it was under repair in places it still stood and held. That bridge, the Triborough Bridge on which my own great-grandfather labored, the George Washington Bridge, Throgs Neck and Whitestone - any of them, all of them, were magnificent beyond belief, numbers and metals and hard human labor all spun out of human minds in a world that made sense once you delved down far enough, once you found the equations and understood the forces.

And for all of that, for all of its humanism, I consider such revelations to be religious experiences. I believe that there is a God; I was raised a Catholic and at times I still am so. I could not call myself that in full honesty, since it implies a certain measure of belief and loyalty to the very human structure of the Church, but that is where my roots lie. What may have made a difference is that I was reared in a parish named after St. Francis of Assissi, the patron of animals. Francis was said to have preached a sermon to the birds and to have concluded a treaty with a wolf, and spoke early and often of the wonder of God made manifest in the natural world. The bridges and highways that I crossed yesterday are no less part of that than the sparrows to which Francis spoke. It all spins out of the same event, all comes out of the same beginning; when the tiny point of nothing at all exploded at the beginning of all things, it was the God I believe in who saw to it that there were laws, equations, rules, bones of the Universe that was being laid down all about. When I first read about quantum theory and observer effect I realised that the God I believed in did not muck about with people's minds or destinies. No, there was free will enough; the God I believed in might have known all things, but being more than time and space, knew all things by perceiving them all at once, as a human being might perceive a beach ball. And in all of that there were rules that had been laid down, so that gas might spin into stars and dust clouds into dust clumps into rocks into planets, so that bubbling compounds might come together and replicate and turn into life. That life might take shape, one, many; those shapes would be as they might be, depending on all around them, on how they were influenced and touched upon by their world. And they would make sense, if only one knew how far down to dig, where to look. The God of the nuclear explosion at the beginning of all things was the same one who set down the rules of creation such that chitin might be strong, that spiders might be able to walk, that silk spun from a spider's spinnerets might be a fiber stronger than any other its size. The quantum observer watched every particle of the smallest of all and by that watching sent them spinning in the direction that would eventually yield a world, and that world might have laws that made sense for the very big, and the very big might one day understand.

And from that understanding there would one day come the numbers and planning and hard work that would yield pylon, mooring, cable, concrete, bridge...

So despite how long my travels took me, and how unnecessary those delays might have been at the time, in the end I think they were well worth it. Now, if you do not mind, I think I had better go and get myself some lunch.

Wish me luck. (crossposted to knitting)

My first proper sweater - not a halter top - is currently pinned to a towel held to my father's workbench by a big ol' carpenter's vise. I have no blocking board, and the device I used last time - my pizza stone - was too small for this project to be blocked on. I've pinned the top over the bottom, since the lines of both parts are the same save at the very top. The sleeves have been pinned separately. I just spent I don't know how long subjecting them to as much heat and steam as I could manage from my iron. When they're tried, I have to sew the shoulder seams and do the neck, then block that and sew in the sleeves.

Here's hoping they dry okay.