"I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful."

^ I like that. It's from a book I'm obsessing like only a thoroughbred nerd could. BUY IT.

My friend is an EMT. Anyways, what it means is that a few nights a week he has to stay in Sparta and listen to a radio. If he hears something on that radio, he has to head on out in the ambulance to help someone after a drug overdose or heart attack or tragic papercut related incident or whatever. He told me the other night he got a call regarding an espcially drunk Irish man. Apparently he had taken the bus from Sparta to New York and back, and in an attempt to get off the bus, fell on his head. My friend said that when he got to the man, he immediately asked him a few required questions. Among them: "Do you have any allergies, sir?" -to which the Irish man plaintively replied: "Fucking Americans."




Speaking of which, I got back from Amsterdam last week.

I got to tag along with my mom, who had a business conference there. She had meetings during the day, so I ambled around and saw museums and factories. The streets there are crumbling and almost medieval, lined with canals and an incessant stream of regal looking locals on bicycles. Everyone was on bicycles. Some people had baskets in the front, filled with groceries or papers or babies. Sometimes a passenger would precariously ride side saddle on the back, making the turning signals for the driver.

At night, all the professors and scientists from the meetings would congregate for dinner. I was a bit of an oddity then, what with being neither a professor, scientist, or wife of one. I heard a lot of bizarre stories. One lady told me almost nostalgically about revolutions in Argentina, another vegan with an uncanny resemblance to Santa Claus told me about a bar fight he had gotten into with an Australian in Brazil. (Apparently caipirinha, South America's answer to absinthe, was the catalyst). There was a man from Switzerland who wore yellow pants and matching yellow loafers every night. Another professor who specialized in sleep warned me about 'pyschological dead time' on airplanes - "NEVER, NEVER sleep on an airplane! There are simply too many factors you cannot control!" Another very round woman from England told me about her family's summer house in the south of France. "We live right next to Johnny Depp!" she told me. "But we haven't caught a glimpse of him yet."

She might have been my favorite. Later, I took a walk with her and her son in the red light district. We walked past glass doors like windows that hookers looked out of, looking for business, some more enthusiastically than others. As we walked past rows and rows of these windows, the woman from England waved and smiled. "Hallo, girls! How are you?" she asked merrily. Her son was not having it. "Mum!" he barked. "You don't say hello! They're prostitutes!" "Oh, shut up, George," she told him. "They're people too!"