Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Back in SF

The trip is over and Berlin and NYC are starting to fade into memories. I do have 2135 pictures which have kept me quite busy, deleting, uploading, selecting, color correcting and transferring them to my laptop.

Being back feels like a bit of a let down. While it's wonderful to see my bed and my dogs and some of my friends again there is a bit of an emotional dip that comes when any grand undertaking comes to an end.

I'm looking forward to grabbing a beer with my buddy tonight and bringing my dogs out to the bar where they are treated like canine royalty.

For the moment I'm off to test out a potential new bike to replace my brand new and stolen steed that was lost before I left for my summer excursion. City bus travel is not sexy. Necessary at times, but not sexy. I did get to overhear a strange conversation snippet. A girthy fifty-something mustached black dude was talking to the forty-something black female bus driver. It sounded like a very dirty conversation at first.

He: "I am telling you, you are miss-missing out!"

She: "I ain't missing out on anything."

He: "I could show you the way. It would be a fingerlickin' good time."

She: "It just ain't up my alley?"

He: "Girl, I bet you ain't had anything good up yo alley like what I could give you."

She: "Why you givin' me such a hard time just because I'm a vegetarian?"

He: "It just ain't right."

Ah, bus conversations. If I was going to ride them more I could do an entire blog about them.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Almost Semi-Famous

I like traveling back to NYC. I have dozens of friends here and when I let them know I'm coming to town it gives me the illusion of having semi-celebrity status. I enjoy the delusion that I fall somewhere between Kobe Bryant and what's his name from that show on the celebrity spectrum. This time I went one step further and had some friends fly from the left coast to meet me. It's always tough to cram in seeing everybody that I want to catch up with. Usually you can tell people "Hey, I'll be at the Blankity Bar on this day at this time. Come soak up my magic and mystery then."

Now however there is The Baby Factor. Some of my friends have these little humans that need to be cared for and they rarely like to bring them out to bars. Then you have your pregnant friends. Pregnant on purpose is certainly better than pregnant in college, but it still makes for a hard sell when trying to entice them join you at bar. Then you try and make drinks into dinner and your poor and alcoholic friends get bent out of shape. It isn't easy trying to make yourself feel more popular than you are so I recommend you either don't try or just take the easier route and be just become rich and famous. Otherwise you'll spend all your vacation time catching up with old friends and no time to do the important things, like, wandering aimlessly about buying random things that you have no room for in your luggage and taking photographs of street art and strange-looking people.