Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm. That’s three days without power or heat. Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process. We are hungry and scavenging for food. Supermarkets are closed. Few places have power.
Continue reading → Recovering from Hurricane Sandy in Jersey City
There I was last week, all fresh and pressed and ready to teach my ASL course at CUNY when I stepped onto the 33rd Street PATH train at Journal Square and found a red, nylon, lunch bag — with a bottle of water hanging onto it from a mesh pouch on the outside — hiding under the train seat.
I immediately had a flashback to my childhood and wanting to help someone — and not to the unassailable advertising posted all over the PATH stations and television warning us that if you see an unattended bag, you need to immediately report it to the PATH authorities. Since I had entered the first car, the engineer exited her locked control booth for a shift change, and I told her I found a bag on the floor.
She ignored me and walked off the train.
Continue reading → Did I Almost Blow Off My Left Arm in the Journal Square PATH Station?
Here is a gift.
Let us know if it explodes.
Call me suspicious, but when I ride the PATH train system between New Jersey and New York and I see Port Authority workers handing out free trinkets again — I begin to wonder if these “Stay Alert!” free gifts are really a new terror threat warning system in disguise. Last week was a trinkets bounty.
Continue reading → Are Port Authority Trinkets Actually Disguised Terror Alerts?
When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — PATH — are forced to create cartoon posters inside their trains to train riders how to behave in public, we begin to wonder how and why we became such a debased society in need of such basic correction.
We experienced a total lunar eclipse last night — and this morning at 6:50am Eastern — Janna took this image with her iPhone of a dying moon, still shining in its ghostly, copper, glory, as it falls into the horizon at the Journal Square PATH train station in Jersey City, New Jersey. The moon, if you can’t see it, is dipping right below the traffic lights in the lower center of the image.
Janna came home last night and presented me with eleven giant, red, heart-shaped helium balloons.
She apologized one was missing.
She told me on her way home from teaching American Sign Language at New York University she found a guy selling bunches of balloons for .64 cents each. She bought a dozen.
Waiting for a PATH train at the Christopher Street station, a man tried to strike up a conversation with her.
That happens to us a lot and since Janna is Deaf she usually just smiles and points to her ears and shakes her head to let the person know she isn’t interested in communicating.
The guy followed her onto the train and persisted in trying to speak with her. Wrangling twelve helium balloons onto a packed train is no easy task.