The pumpkin farm

I like pumpkins.  These pumpkins were in a display window for a hair salon–telling passersby that their establishment is so good they can even style vegetables.

For most of my life I lived up the block from a pumpkin farm.  The guy who ran the pumpkin farm was also my bus driver all four years of high school.  That’s the kind of town it was.

One October I walked down to the pumpkin farm with my mom and my older brother.  They offered free hay rides to pick your own pumpkin straight from the field, but we just wandered around near the farm stand.  And while wandering around, we spotted a very, very large pumpkin.  And my brother approached it and tried to move it to get an idea of how heavy it was.  That was when he grabbed onto the stem on top–and it immediately came off in his hand.

When it comes to pumpkins, the stems are valuable.  No one wants to buy a pumpkin without its stem.   Unless maybe the person just wants to cook with the pumpkin, not decorate with it.  So the stem coming off the monster pumpkin was this gasp-inducing moment, followed immediately by the sounds of an angry Jamaican farm hand  yelling about how that pumpkin would never sell now.  Like an orphan no one wanted that would slowly rot and get tossed onto the street on its eighteenth birthday.

I felt bad for my brother.  I still feel bad thinking about it now.  I remember his face so vividly.  It’s the same face you’d make if you accidentally dropped a crystal vase at a rich lady’s house.  Shame.  Embarrassment.  Worry.

Yeah, it was just a pumpkin.  But to my bus driver, the pumpkins were his crystal vases.

The recreational activities of female genitalia.

Oh. My. God. Something beautiful has happened. In the past few days, HUNDREDS more people than usual have viewed my blog.  And it’s all thanks to a little search term called…vagina.

Plain ol’ “vagina” is bringing in the most people, but runners up include “big vagina,” “dirty vagina,” “vagina is purple,” “piece of vagina” (ah!), “light up vagina” (OOH!), and “how to make a finger vagina.” That last one sounds like it came from a terribly confused soul who inquired about a noun when a verb was intended.

In case you only recall there ever being talk of Barbara Walters lap dances or Tom Brokaw sex dreams on this blog, click here to see a giant bicycle vagina. That also sounds like it was meant to be a verb (giant vagina bicycling), but it really is a noun. It’s a giant bicycle vagina. And it’s amazing.

Well.  I got completely distracted by vaginas in this post.  Here are some less interesting things I may have done had vaginas not stolen the show:

• Complained tirelessly about banks and their exorbitant overdraft charges.
• Cooked you a steak like Cher in Moonstruck.  (You’d have eaten it rare while wearing a wooden hand.)
• Wished you a Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
• Referred you to this Craiglist ad.
• Compared Kim Jong-Il to a summer’s day. 
• Presented a hypothetical question asking: “If you were a predator, would you be less likely to pursue as prey someone who walked down the sidewalk wielding a fork?”
• Reminisced about the Halloween I dressed up as a fork.
• Mentioned the fork that is literally in my road, in the tar of my road.
• Displayed an obvious affection for bullet points.
• Retracted Kim Jong-Il comparison.

Scarves, Meditation Beads, Wi-Fi, and other ways to pick up women

Least interesting pick-up line I’ve heard in a long time: “Can I borrow your scarf? I’d really like to. No? Can I borrow your name, then?” Does that ever work anywhere, never mind outside of a Queens bar on a Wednesday night at 3am?

A much better way to go about it is to sit down next to someone in a place offering free public wi-fi and ask them how the connection is working. That’s what this nice guy from Nepal did to me a week ago. I’d had WAY too much coffee, so I couldn’t stop smiling no matter what he said even though I wasn’t remotely interested. He asked me what I like to do in New York, and I said, “I like Bryant Park, Central Park, and the Hudson River.” I was just trying to list really vague things so that he wouldn’t track me down and rape me or anything. He got really excited about my list, though, and he said, “We like the same things!!” He was a balding, 35 year old IT guy. Then he asked me about the skating rink at Bryant Park and said we should go together sometime. It was pretty awkward, but at least he didn’t ask to borrow my scarf.

Anyway, Halloween is over. Saturday (Nov. 1st) they were playing Christmas songs at the mall. I’ve had trouble keeping track of the time of the year lately and I said, “But it’s not even Halloween yet.” What is wrong with me? Okay, I was hungover, but still. I get disorientated really easily. And time is less fixed when you work part-time and at night. You don’t have to plan ahead for a Monday, November 17th board meeting, you just have to tell yourself, hey, go to work on Wednesday night. Which makes it easy to forget what season you’re in apparently. I love it.

Sometimes it seems like everyone you meet is completely crazy. There was this dude, Dave, on the 7 train at 3am last night who was kind of squatting there. He said he’d just gotten back from India. He read me some mantras in Sanskrit. He complained about it being too cold on trains that go above ground (apparently the E train is good for sleeping). I touched his meditation beads. It was a pretty intimate thing, except that he seemed completely out of his mind. Then it was my stop and we parted ways. He said, “I’ll probably never see you again.” And I said, “Yeah, we’ll see.”

I love New York.