18 January 2009

you have a boat

I meant to go outside today. It was all pretty out there, and I was going to ride my bike to RE1 and look for hiking boots. But then I got caught up in catching up on some emailing and got a headache from looking at the computer screen (this happens to me at work about three days a week) and then I spilled hot tea in my lap and now I am icing my lap.

So my advice to all is this: do not attempt to hold your tea upright between your legs while reaching over to get your computer. It will hurt, unless your tea is lukewarm, in which case there is no point to it anyway. In that case, make some new tea.

I have been slightly obsessed with this plane that landed on the Hudson. I love planes. I love them partly because I am a little afraid of them. Like a rollercoaster, they wouldn't be any fun if they were completely and totally safe. And I seriously need to learn how to fly them myself.

Given that I lived for a year four blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center in New York, given that I have friends from law school all over that city, the words "plane crash in New York" made my stomach drop into my toes. When I opened the NYTimes website, I was flabbergasted. "People survived that crash!" I told my coworker. "They are standing on the wing!" And they even rescued the plane. If I were in New York, living where I lived two years ago, I would have walked over to the pier where the plane was tethered, just a few blocks from my apartment. That is where I walked when I needed to get out and see sky.

It is not just because it is New York. I swore off New York, after all, when I left there, beaten and exhausted from three years of city chaos and law school. (I think now that I might have liked that city better if I'd had a happy light back then...) But watching ferries converge on that boat, I kinda sorta thought I might be willing to go back. It is a city, after all, where bike messengers stop to help you carry your couch up five flights of stairs. And, as it turns out, a city where commuter ferries pull the survivors of plane crashes out of the water.

How, I kept wondering, did people know what to do? Then again, what else can you do? There are people in the water, and you have a boat.

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