Courteous bike rider.

The other morning on my ride in to school, the light was just starting to turn yellow as I biked quickly across one lane of a boulevard and then the same on the other, but as I was going through the second lane and the light was just turning red, I could see a(n older) (gray-haired) (African-American) woman on a powder blue granny bike start to brake to a halt crossways to my right, to let me go through, rather than keep up her pace and just cruise through the intersection as the light changed for her.

"Sorry!", I yelled out as I biked by, right through where she should have been.

"Oh, it's no problem!", she called out, pleasantly.

My plastic tupperware died.

I've had these high-grade, lightweight-but-microwaveable tupperware containers forever, but like all 3 of my smaller ones have died.

The 2 round ones got cracked lids, and the 1 square box-y one got a bit cracked from me carrying my lunch in it in my backpack, and then lately the rubber rim holding the clear plastic lid in place got torn off a bit, to the point where the lid fell out of it and can't be reattached.

I've gotten a lot of good use out of them, but it bothers me that this heavy-duty plastic will now be headed for the dump.

I'm still using the 2 round ones, though.

7-11 bullshit:

Like 1;30am after I head out from a bar, I drop into a 7-11 overwhelmed with drunken people, to get 3 taquitos before I go hit the subway home.

As I wait in this long interminable line for the one counterperson, a few people walk in, go stand in front of the taquito and hotdog warmer, and some other counterperson comes out of the back and they say something and she gives them the last 3 taquitos, the very same 3 taquitos which I had been waiting for.

"Oh my G-d," I was like to the person in front of me, and I told her what had happened.

"That's some bullshit," she was like.

I then put back on the shelf the pack of gum I was going to get so I could have a piece so my breath didn't smell like taquitos after I ate them, and I just left the store without buying anything.

Three neighborhood sights.

The other week I ran some errands mid-day, and on my walk home there was...:

1)  Some people rebuilding a shuttered house that had been foreclosed on a long time now, and the new building permit in the window said that the building was being converted to a 2-flat from an illegal 3-flat.

2)  A sunken yard covered in gravel with animal statues of dogs and turtles and squirrels and whatnot perfectly spaced all over and across the yard, all about one foot from one other in a kind of a grid pattern.

3) Some (Mexican) workers mixing up cement or something and hauling it up to the roof of a three-story block-y building using a pulley installed off the roof edge, and a (young) guy in a purple T-shirt  attaching the bucket to the rope and pulling it up gave out a wordless yell to signal to someone on the roof that a new bucket was up there and he should come get it.

Observation of my one neighbor who was traumatized by Hurricane Katrina.

My one neighbor from New Orleans had been opening up to me about her anxiety after living through Hurricane Katrina when we hung out the other month, so the next time I saw her, I gently brought up with her what she had said to me, to just let her know that she had been heard and to let her know that always has someone to talk to.

"It's not that bad," she was like, "It just comes and goes, and sometimes something just triggers it."

Oddly enough, she said, one of those times was when her beat-up car that she really liked got towed by the city.

"It was like this feeling, that every time that I have something I like, it just gets taken away from me," she said.

Detail from my one language coordinator friend.

My one friend who coordinates languages at the school I go to is quite the free spirit.

She's very mellow, but sings jazz.

And, every once in a while she just drops a detail like, "The last time I was in Paris, I meant to look up that one drummer who I used to date, but I was dating someone else at the time and I thought I probably shouldn't."

A sight the other weekend at a lakefront park:

The other weekend out at a beautiful lakefront park here in the city, tons of people of all ages and races and nationalities are out walking, and then there's three (middle-aged) (South Asian) women in hijabs, one in a little amigo since she has some mobility disability.

They're just strolling along and wheeling along, all just part of the crowd.