run-ins

i had various slips of the tongue this weekend that highlight my overall character trait of being an outsider and not very much well connected with the goings on of other people who are not immidiately me. fine. but, to not cause the same problem, i will not post the intricacies of the mishaps on my blog. instead i will say this:

on friday i wrote a nice blog entry about the process of cooking greens. it was educational and fun, but i lost it in the process of spell checking - so dont ever expect me to do that again; spell check, that is. then i really lost it and began banging my head on the floor. later i may have drank some tequila. the next day i was on my friends roof eating hamburgers and i fell out of a hammock onto my knees while the sun was setting and the sky was purple and the clouds were orange. people didnt even laugh that much, but the wind was blowing. later, i accidentally kicked a mirror and it broke, now there is no mirror in my house. i kicked it on purpose, but it broke by accident. just now, at a restaurant, my chair fell over but i wasnt in it.

on friday, before all of this, i was leaving my job and walking down the street when i walked into a person who was my teacher in high school. she was walking down the street with her son and we looked at each other in the face for a couple of seconds so that it was right for us to say hello to each other even if we really deep down thought that it might be better to walk past because there might not be so much to say to this person and besides, we were pleased to be out of work and the sun was still out and we had on our mp3 players and our favorite song was playing and the day was just hitting its stride and we may have been walking in that stride. she was nice and she remembered my name, which i didnt expect, and her son was a nice kid, which i really didnt expect. i told my ex-teacher that i too was a teacher and that i was graduating soon and she was pleased about that because the subject i am graduating in was the one she taught. she told me that she too was still teaching but now she taught eighth grade, which is different but also less stressful in some ways. they were on their way to seeing the mets game and i happened to know a lot about the mets game that night and i spit out some facts and some nuances to look for as far as jose reyes needing to start walking more and cliff floyd needing to so something productive and i also pointed out to him that i once went to a met game where steve trachsel was pitching and i caught a foul ball and that since steve trachsel would be pitching that night, the kid should be on his toes. to that, the kid replied, "steve trachsel stinks", which i found not to be the correct attitude to go into a game with, so i replied,
"he isnt that bad. he is coming off of injury. besides, i caught the ball off of a ball that he hit." my ex teacher was impressed with the fact that her son was responding to me positively and suggested that i babysit for her son on some occasion or other. to that i grunted a sound of maybe.
just then, a woman walked up and approached my ex teacher and called her by her teacher name and was obviously another student of my high school. she was now living in boston and was just in town for a little while so it was doubly random that she ran into her ex-teacher. she was of the graduating class two years ahead of mine and the teacher did not remember her so well. then the woman went into rolodex mode, listing every person that she associated with 12 years ago and some that she still does, hoping to be remembered. while she did that, i talked more to the kid about baseball, but also with the air of an audition. out of the corner of my ear, i heard the woman mention the name of the sister of a friend of mine who i havent seen in a few years ever since he moved to the phillippenes and decided not to keep in touch with anybody. when i heard this, i said to her, "do you know m---?"
"yes, that is the brother of c---." so it was so. so i decided to wait around until they were done talking so that i could try to find out some information about my friend. their conversation took longer than i had expected, but the kid was a nice kid and when they were done, i walked with teh woman and asked her about m---. "last i heard about him, he was kind of trying to find himself. he went with c--- to the phillippenes."
"that was like 2 or 3 years ago."
she thought, "yeah, it must have been."
"he hasnt come back. he is still there, but i havent heard anything about him."
"oh, well, i know c--- said that he was trying to find himself, but that was a while ago." i had already decided that if i had to walk with this person until the next subway station, i would go into it and take the train, even though i wanted to walk a mile or so because it was nice out. the woman was nice but i didnt know her and didnt think that we would become friends because of this walk and also she didnt have any information on my friend so we were going to have to get into conversation about high school and who else we knew, but before any of that, she stopped and said that she had to turn the corner in order to get home and then offered me her card so that i could email her and then she could email me back the email address of her friend, c--- who would then be able to better answer any of the questions i may have been having about m---. so i was alone again and it was still warm and sunny, though there was more shade on the street then there had been and in order to walk in teh sun, i had to walk on a thin strip of sidewalk. but i walked about a mile and reset my mp3 player back to the beggining of the album that had been playing this whole time, quietly blasting through my headphone speakers, announcing my transience - and then took the train from there and got home with a wonderful idea to write a blog entry about how to cook greens.