Three people, on a subway ride on a hot day:

1) A (strung out-looking) (middle-aged) (dreaded) (black) man, smelling heavily of cigarettes and leaning into the breasts of this (large) (foreign) (black) woman with a(n African?) accent, saying that he only got so upset because he loves her so much.

2) A (younger middle-aged) (Asian-American) guy who sits next to me on the crowded train and puts in headphones and has the volume all the way up to the point where I can hear heavy bass beats coming through them, and who later jumps up when a mom and some kids come onto the train, to offer them his seat.

3) A(n early 20s) (mild-faced) (Jewish-looking) woman with arm tatts, who stares downward at her phone, and smells distinctly of BO.

A (fresh-looking) (clean-shaven) (skinny) (young 20s) (shirtless) (hispanic) guy on the subway.

The other week, I was coming home from work very late, almost after midnight, and across the car from me was this (fresh-looking) (clean-shaven) (skinny) (young 20s) (shirtless) (hispanic) guy, who had a backpack on and his shirt tucked in through one of the backpack straps, and these big headphones on, that he listened to as he stared off into space.

And, something seemed very, very off with him, with how he was too chill, and how he was listening to music with his shirt off, and just everything.

At one point, he stirs a lot in his seat, then he suddenly settles into it, shifting his arm so that his hand is on his lap and he can play with the hairs below his belly button, which he then does, all lacksadaisically.

A lot later towards the end of the ride when we're on the other side of downtown, then, he stands up, and all of a sudden he looks at the map and looks worried but he does that all without moving too quickly at all, and he asks me, "Sir," what way we're going and how can he find a train going downtown.

So, I tell him that we're actually heading away from downtown now, but at the next platform he can hop off and walk across and catch the train there, and that would take him back into downtown.

At that, he nodded.

After a pause, I asked him if he was visiting the city.

"Kind of," he was like.

As we were pulling into the next station, then, which is where I was getting off, the other train happens to be pulling in from the opposite direction and the guy goes and stands at the car door and is leaning forward like he's chomping at the bit to get off and go get onto the other train, but there's a slight delay in opening the doors, and as soon as they open, it's too late, the doors are closing on the other side and he can't make it in, and the sign above says the next train is coming in 20 minutes.

At that, he stamps his foot mildly and kind of reels around dramatically,and walks away down the platform.

After a few minutes going up the other end of the platform to the exit where I usually get off, I pause and look back, and way down the platform his head is sticking out from behind an advertisement divider, and he's looking at me, and then his head pops back behind the sign and he disappears.

He seemed on drugs, or a hustler, or both, though I don't think I'll ever know, sometimes life is like that.

As I left, I made sure to look back, to make sure he wasn't following me.

He wasn't.

Another swarm of (Chinese-American) bike kids.

The other Saturday, I was coming out of the grocery store in my neighborhood at like around nine-thirty at night, and up the main drag comes a swarm of like six or seven or eight or nine (Chinese-American) bike kids, who were in middle school or maybe early high school and might have been in their teenage years, it seemed to me.

They were riding on the right side of the street, but they took up a lot of space and were all spaced out and were riding sometimes in the bike lane and at other times way out in the lane, to the point where a car had to slow down behind them and wait for them, though they were all riding very fast, and weaving back and forth across the lanes.

It was something like a show of force, it seemed, with the simplicity and the recklessness of youth, kind of like as if they were living for themselves and for now, but still innocently.

Only one had a bikelight, and one had a radio strapped to the back of his bike, playing hip-hop.

A sight when watering a neighbor's plants while she's away on vacation...

...and after I spend ten minutes at the door, trying to get the fussy deadbolt to switch the right way so that I can open the door and go in and water the plants:

A pillbug on the dirt of the flower pot, temporarily immobile as water floods the surface, then all scurrying again as soon as the water drains down a bit into the dirt and its legs touch the ground again.

It was the same color as the dirt, too, mostly.

Personal Aide Tidbits (2 of 2): Anecdote of an ER.

After that joke, we got talking, and I was telling her that someone had told me that this one hospital a bit south of hers keeps boxes full of the stuff that they pull out of people's asses.

"Yeah, a lot of hospitals do that," she was like.

She then said that she knew this one nurse and a doctor who worked in the same ER, and they said that they had a box like that, and pretty much everyone has one, too.

They also told her how this one guy came in once with a towel wrapped around his waist and blood running down his legs, and then this woman came in with major  scalp wounds, and both were embarrassed and wouldn't say how they got their injuries, and it was obvious that they were together, even though they made sure to come in separately.

As it turns out, she's an epileptic and was giving him head in the kitchen when she went into a seizure, and as she clenched up, her jaw clamped right down on his penis.

And, he kept trying, but he couldn't get her off, so he eventually picked up a carving fork and kept jamming it into her head, to try to get her off him.

Eventually, somehow they separated, and then they both went into the emergency room.

Her head was bad, and he was "pretty chewed up," as my client put it.

Personal Aide Tidbits (1 of 2): Humor.

The one woman with disabilities who I work for and her lesbian sister both have a very dirty sense of humor.

The other week when I came to her house to go on shift, they were both there, and I asked her how she was doing that day.

"Rough, but plugging along," she was like.

"Rough buttplugging," I was like.

I really got them both laughing with that one.

Apartment drama.

The other week the people upstairs were noisy one morning, and I kept hearing sounds like they were taking stuff downstairs.

So, I assumed that maybe one of their roommates was moving out.

But, I then ran into them, and it turns out that the landlord had sent them a letter saying that he wasn't going to renew their lease, and they didn't know why, and a neighbor had said that maybe they were selling the building!

So, I started to spaz, since I didn't know what was happening, and I was worried that not only would I have to go find another apartment, but also that it might fuck me up with residency somehow, with the election that I'm running in.

The landlord returned my call later that day, though, and it turns out that everything was all right.

The landlord who I had rented from had died last winter, and his son had gotten the building, so that's who I was dealing with, and, as it turns out, the building that *he* was living in was getting sold, so he knew that the apartment above me had enough rooms for him and his family, so he looked at when that lease was ending and gave them formal notice of non-renewal like 3 months ahead of time, so that they could find something and so that him and his family could move in there.

But, the rest of us in the building are good, and he's getting the lease renewals together, and everything is the same price as last year.

Phew.