[A NIGHT OUT]
On the Town

6:00:15, P.M. – My phone rings, 15 seconds after my alarm clock. Jennifer is on the phone wondering if I still want to do something tonight. I am groggy, grouchy even. She wants me to decide between a piano concert at the 3rd Street School of Music or a night at the Rubin Museum of Art looking at their 800 year anniversary retrospective of Chinggis Khan’s Mongols. After 10 minutes of indecision I settle out of desperation on the Rubin. Jennifer says she’ll meet me in the first car of the A train at 59th street where she is sitting in Borders working on her notes after work. She tells me to bring Tylenol.

7:30 – After calling Jennifer three times she calls me back. The train was so crowded, and I wasn’t sure if she got on or not. And I didn’t know if I was supposed to get off and look for her or not . . . . She didn’t get on my train. She lets 7 trains go by before she climbs out of the train station to check her phone and listen to me tell her I’m already at the museum, waiting, reading a book on participatory economics through my “early morning” haze. Now, Jennifer is here, looking tired. I forgot the Tylenol. She says she’s feeling better. We try not to be mad at each other.

9:00 – I can see why Professor Rossabi who teaches my course on the Mongols in History at Columbia University doesn’t really like the Rubin Museum. The stuff is all so modern (nothing older than 19th century), it doesn’t really present a very good narrative, it has virtually nothing to do with Chinggis (1162-1227). It’s still a little bit interesting – the pictures are good. I’m starving. The tour guide talks with weird consonants and strange S’s, it’s driving Jennifer nuts. We go down to the coat-check and claim our coats from the videogame playing attendant who is very nice. And hunt for sesame pancake sandwiches over by Union Square. It’s cold but Jennifer says her body is warm under her red quilted down coat. I carry her backpack which has a computer and glass water-bottle in it. Jennifer tells me about her patients today and the politics of OTing.

9:45 – Jennifer is getting really tired. The food is good at Vanessa’s Dumplings, with just the right amount of cilantro and lively Chinese workers. Jennifer thinks I am staring too much. Probably. It’s time to get Jennifer home. We try the L train but see that the next train isn’t coming for 12 minutes and chase down the M14 bus instead. We sit down across from a small boy with a lickmouth problem who is fighting with his older brother over who gets to press the “stop request” button. The older brother wins. We get off a block early by mistake, and walk past a homeless woman shrouded in black, surrounded by three overflowing pushcarts. Jennifer wonders how she moves them around. We wait for the A train and talk about whether or not women use more fake facial expressions then men, if black and latino people get caught with marijuana more often than white people because they all live with their parents and grandparents and can’t smoke at home so they have to do it outside. In the A train, there is a young black man across from us sleeping really deeply even though he is sitting up. Later he wakes up and starts yelling. Jennifer thinks he’s mad at me for looking at him.

10:30 – Jennifer slips and falls on the ice in front of the 24-hr immigrant carwash half a block from our apartment. I tell them to put some more salt down on the sidewalk. Jennifer is sore but ok. She laughs at the sludge on the butt region of her coat. I knock down the picture collage in the hallway of our apartment with her backpack.