Apple Picking and Theater Going

So I'm super late in putting these pictures up, and I'm also not going to do a very good job of discussing them because I feel like my brain is going to fall out. Beyond working a lot this weekend, I also probably shouldn't stay out until 11:30 on a Tuesday night, even if there is only one hard cider involved in the evening...

So two weeks ago, I went apple picking out in the Cranston/Johnston area, which is really like 30 minutes outside of Providence. It's super odd. You drive to basically where Gahanna would be in relation to Columbus and suddenly you're in farm fields and among pumpkin patches. I suppose that's true of Ohio; it was just shocking to feel like I hadn't gotten out of the city in a month and then to feel like I was in the boonies.

We actually ended up going to three apple picking places. This was the first one:

My heart practically stopped. They had mini apple pies! Pumpkin butter! Apple butter! Make your own peanut butter! But no hot cider and no apple cider donuts. This is why we ended up going to two other places. We never really found hot cider (although yes on the donuts). Sarah, pictured below, ended up swigging cold cider from a jug.

I actually only included this picture to show that I'm not making up friends. This is Sarah, hiding in a tree. She found a concord grape tree after a kid crawled out from under it.

So we got back with just enough time for me to drop off my pound of apples that one does not know what I'll do with, change clothes and hop a bus into downtown. I wish I had taken a picture of my ensemble with my new fall jacket. I was wearing a purple dress and black and white jacket with white shoes and black hose, and I tell you this old woman at the play stared my footwear down. She straight-up judged me. I all pretended like I didn't notice and that I was enjoying being young and wearing brightly colored, potentially inappropriate things to outings that only old people enjoy.

And good god, it was all old people. You really aren't supposed to take pictures of the insides of theaters, but I think people mostly felt bad for me because I was alone in the bench (read: backless, poor people) seats in the back. The theater people kindly allowed me and the three other people who were in bench seats to move to the last row of real seating because the house wasn't even close to full. You know how much that saved me? Somewhere in the range of $20. RIDICULOUS. The play itself - at a big theater downtown - was good but not great. I think though that I probably didn't love it as much because I was hungry. I ended up eating my second apple cider donut in small pieces out of my purse while pretending to look at placards at a far end of the theater.

Yes, my life is glamorous.

Mall Times!!!

So I can't think of a good bus story to save my life. There are just a lot of smells and a lot of uncomfortable touching that is appropriate nowhere else in life. I do, however have much tamer stories of working at the mall.

I wish I had more pictures, but I have no more mall shifts for a month because I have to get a car to avoid all that uncomfortable bus touching on the way there.

This is the world's best representation of mall culture. People are basically Starbucks in expensive jeans (Okay ignore the fact that the tag right next to these jeans proves they're supah cheap... it was H&M, they're meant to look expensive). 

I'm right across from Five Guys, so sometimes it smells like french fries and I often get caught gazing out the window at some guy who thinks I'm actively watching him eat a cheeseburger by himself. I'm sure this makes us both equally sad about ourselves. We get a lot of pre and post bar traffic as well. My favorites are the women who stop in, pretend to look around and fix their hair and or makeup in one of our many mirrors on their way to the bar next door. I already told you about the woman who stopped in to change into her heels before a blind date. "I have the world's worst feet." Okay, whoa, I don't want to know the condition of some stranger's feet. I wanted to say, "then maybe you shouldn't show them to a man who might otherwise like you," but I held back. Why these women always feel like talking to me makes it more okay that they have no intention of buying anything is beyond me. Awkward small talk is not a goal we set for the day.

Last time I worked, no one bought a single thing all day, but someone did steal my pen, so, there's that. He politely asked to borrow it and then just walked out of the store without using it. Later the same day, a woman who had already walked around and checked every mirror we had about 15 minutes earlier came back in and asked to borrow the computer to check her email. I let her because, well, she couldn't very well walk out the door with the computer (or if she did, I would have an amazing story). She told me she had come to meet friends at the bar next door, but they had meant the Arena District location. Then she told me she never leaves the house after 9 o'clock and this was too much to deal with. What exactly do you do when a stranger tells you something so depressing? I might be that woman one day.

Okay, I felt the need to put another picture. These are some baskets. No reason.

The only other really exciting part of working at the mall is getting to go through the secret hallway behind the stores. The floor is concrete, our store's door still says Buckle on it and it reeks of that horrible cologne they pump into Hollister. It's. So. Cool. You only wish you were important enough to travel the seedy underbelly of the mall with such skill and purpose. (Okay so twice I've gotten lost on the way out and had to give the trash I was carrying to some maintenance guy with a big cart, but I feel special anyway). Keep the blog alive: check.

Buses

I've been meaning to write this post for a while.

So where I go is kind of (sometimes) interesting, but how I get there is generally vaguely unpleasant for some reason or another. You know buses. You know the kind of people who ride buses and wait for buses. However, I still have two stories.

First, some backstory. I ride two buses to work every day (unless I choose to walk the first leg, which I do if I miss a bus, it's a nice day, or I'm feeling really adventurous or fat). The first bus is almost always quite nice, mostly because it's not marketed as a bus.

It's a historic trolley.

Yeah, you're jealous. Anyway, this bus is full of college students and business suit-wearing people who scroll through their iPods, comb their hair, and otherwise sit very quietly away from each other.

The second bus I ride is an actual bus, and this is where anything interesting happens. All of my stories involve this bus.

Story #1

I boarded a bus in the morning as a usually do and sat somewhere towards the middle, as I usually do. I watched as the masses of people boarded after me, including a woman balancing two books on her head while wearing headphones and sunglasses. She sat directly in front of me. The bus was pretty crowded, and we started off, at which point the man behind me started to have a conversation on his cell phone.

To be fair to the woman, he was very loud and he had a habit of cussing every other word. Everybody else in the bus just ignored it, but the woman, never turning around, said in a very clear voice, "I have my headphones turned all the way up, and I can still hear you talking, sir. It's Ave Maria, and I've got the Bible on my head. Stop talking on your cell phone."

And the man behind stopped talking for about half a second before saying to the person on the other end of the phone, "This crazy lady just told me to shut up." And then he continued his conversation.

So the woman in front of me took the Bible off her head and slammed it down on the floor. She repeated, "I've got the Bible, now stop talking you Devil man." I'm not kidding, that's what she called him.

So he started laughing or something and she finally reached over - as in reached over MY seat - and straight up almost hit him with a Bible.

I'm not totally sure, but I feel like that's not what bibles are for.

At this point the bus driver took notice and started to call back to this woman. The cell-phone-talking man was actually starting to get a little freaked out now, because the woman had stood up and started to ascend the two steps up. She just sort of stood there, looming in the aisle. The bus driver was still calling back, but one can imagine that over Ave Maria, perhaps she really couldn't hear anything.

Long story short, they had to get a cop to escort her off the bus. The man continued his cell phone conversation.

Story #2

I would like to preface this story by saying that it is totally true and not exaggerated. The foods mentioned are completely accurate.

I was going to a business meeting with a person from another organization (!) and I was waiting for the bus at about 1 pm in the afternoon. A girl with a very young child - maybe 2 - were standing at the bus stop, as was an older man eating cheetos. I took my spot somewhat away from both parties. The man then began to approach me. He tried to offer me his cheetos, which I declined (twice). He may have tried to talk, but it was difficult for me to make out. Eventually he wondered over to the mother and her child and tried to offer them cheetos. The girl - probably younger than me - was talking on her cell phone and tried to ignore the man, so he started trying to poke the 2-year old with this bag of cheetos. When the child didn't respond, the man pulled out a bottle of vodka from his bag and drank the last of it. Thank God he didn't offer that to the child.

This was really only the beginning of the man's generosity though. He started to pull out more things from his bag to offer to the child. He pulled out bologna. He pulled bacon. Raw bacon. Eventually it became clear the no one would take anything from him, so he wondered out to the side of the church that stood behind us and peed. Peed in a churchyard. In broad daylight. Visible from the sidewalk, not even in a bush or anything.

By this time, the bus had finally arrived. I boarded and the man boarded directly behind me and didn't pay for his ticket. The bus was completely packed and about 5 minutes late, and so the bus driver wasn't having it. After the man mumbled that he was homeless several times, some woman in the front paid for him, and he finally took a seat. The entire bus bubbled over with commentary about the whole thing, especially the two men behind me who were trying to decide if because God was watching all the time, did that mean you had to do good deeds all the time? And he probably could have bought a bus ticket if he hadn't bought that second bottle of vodka he was drinking on the bus, haha. (Rough transcription.)

I frankly couldn't keep my eyes off the whole thing too. It just kept going and getting worse. When the busdriver had to strap in a boarding passenger in a wheelchair, the homeless drunk man offered the busdriver bacon. (The busdriver practically kicked him off the bus right then.) Eventually, the homeless man stopped trying to offer his food to other people and just ate a plum in his seat before appearing to fall asleep.

About the same time all of this was happening, a well dressed man with a messenger bag sitting across from me handed a white pamphlet to the man sitting next to him. A few seconds later, his arm wafted - and this is exactly how I mean to describe it - in an arc towards me. Without looking at me at all, he handed me a pink brochure with a lamb on it and a bunch of quotes about hearing voices that are really God. I didn't really know what to do with it so I just held it. Later I got a look at the other pamphlet, the dainty pink one, which turned out to be titled, "Hell: the Destiny of Sinners."


So I know you have bus stories, too - care to share?

Irene: Three Days without Power, One and Half Weeks sans Internet

 

So I know you can't see anything in this picture. I took it during the storm, but because I'm not adventurous and I don't like waiting for the eye of the storm and then walking out to take pictures only to have my trailer blown over behind me, this picture shows absolutely nothing. 

It's probably fitting really. The storm itself - no biggie. A lot of wind, a little rain. It was the aftermath. The eastside of Providence has a ton of enormous trees - like so enormous that when semis wobble through, their tops scrape whole sections of tree. All of these enormous trees meant that as soon as even the slightest wind came whistling through, all of the powerlines were tangled with loose limbs. The storm started on Sunday morning, and I woke up at 9 am to a blank clock face. That was actually the most bizarre and disorienting thing - as if there just wasn't any time anymore. 

The power stayed off all Sunday and all Monday, but Tuesday morning, when I walked outside to go to work, there were two firetrucks flanking my front door. When I put something in my trashcan, a firefighter leaned out of his window and said, "You might not want to stand under that."

I was standing beneath one of those ubiquitous branch-and-powerline combos. First time I had even noticed it. 

So the power came back on after three days, but then it was the end of August and the end of our internet service. I have been dying a little bit every day since.

BUT it's back, so now I have to stuff in some pictures of things I did. Like... 

The Rhode Island School of Design has like a 6 floor museum with a real range of stuff, and I went last Sunday because they had a pay-what-you-want morning. You really aren't supposed to take pictures, but when I saw the Alexander McQueen Butterfly dress from his 2008 collection, well, somehow I thought you'd just appreciate it too much for me not to include it. Anyway, there were a ton of things there that we studied in that art history class: a Sol LeWitt white box structure, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Rothko, Andy Warhol, a post-Cindy Sherman light painting thing... 

This was the same weekend that I went to a farmer's market (and later I went to a grocery store, but that's less interesting). I neglected to take a picture of the market (very small, very depressing) itself, but I did document the bounty:

This includes a cabbage, 4 eggplants, 3 bell peppers, 5 ears of corn, 4 plums, 2 peaches, 1 tomato, 2 cloves of garlic, a bundle of green beans, a bundle of basil, and a bag of squash type things which I decided I didn't really like. 

I went a little crazy.

So yeah, no really interesting stories here. I just felt like I needed to show something for all the time I spent pretending to read and really just surfing my phone for recipes.