(A regular, not a "New York English," vlog entry.)

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The Sub(way)continent

Today’s soundtrack: each night is like a thousand years
Today at 5:02pm: trying to stay on-schedule

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"Where are you from," asks the guy. For fuck's sake, just lemme pay for my sandwich and get the fuck out of here.

"Queens," I tell the guy, impatiently. I know the sandwich is going to be $6.04, and I have exact change.

"No," says the guy, and I struggle not to roll my eyes.

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So the deal is, if you're white, or black, or maybe even Latino, you probably don't have to put up with this, but if you're Asian in America, you get this all the time:

- Some guy asks where you're "from."
- You tell him one of the boroughs, but it is inconceivable to him that you have slanted eyes and had the gall to emerge from your mother's vagina in Jackson Heights.
- So then he says "No, where are you really from?"
- and when you play his little game and say "Korea," it's inevitably followed with something like

a) "Oh, I love Korean girls" or
b) "Hey, I know a Korean guy in Oregon named Peter, do you know him?"

to which the only proper responses are

a) "Hang on, I'll get you one; what size?" or
b) "Yes, yes, I know Peter, I'll say 'what's up' to him for you at the next conference."

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"No," says the guy, and I struggle not to roll my eyes. Then I take the trouble to actually focus them and see the cashier is brown, which startles me. He smiles politely. "What I mean is, what is your origin?"

South Asian and with a slight British accent, this guy ain't the type that normally asks you this question. Slightly disarmed, I say "My parents are from Korea."

"Oh," he says. "I was sure you were from Nepal."

"What?" I say.

"That is why I asked," he explains. "I am from Nepal, and you look very much like you are from Nepal."

I take a hard look at the guy and crinkle the sides of my mouth. Even adjusting for our skin tones, we don't look a damn thing alike. Then I start wondering what the fuck this guy's doing working in a Subway. Sounds like he went to school and his educated inflection makes me think he could finish the New York Times crosswords well before I could. Street in Tangiers, that type of shit.

"You look very much like the people from the hill region of Nepal," he explains. "You look very, very familiar to me." By the way he says it, it's clear he doesn't mean I look like someone specific he knows, but that I look the part. "I was sure you were a countryman of mine," he adds, smiling again.

"The hill region of Nepal," I say, almost dreamily, suddenly forgetting about my sandwich.

"Yes," he says. "They have your features. You have their features."

"No kidding," I say.

"That will be $6.04," he says.

"I know," I say. I have exact change.

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Today’s soundtrack: and in her mouth, an amethyst

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Today at 12:02pm: painting the floors of the studio

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Your passions make you do strange things. In recent months I've become obsessed with Scottish accents and also with Scotch whiskey, like something in my DNA suddenly snapped and went Glaswegian. I'm sure it sounds foolish but it's really no stranger than anything else happening in my life.

Bartender Girl even did me the favor of picking up a "Learning the Scottish Accent" CD at an actor's bookstore (which indirectly sparked the idea for my little "Learn the New York accent" segments on Youtube, more of which are to come). I've listened to the CD and followed along in the booklet but so far I can only say one or two things with any conviction, and I bet any real Scot who heard me would spit their Macallan's out.

Back to the strange things. Shortly after forming the first obsession I added a bunch of movies to my Netflix queue, movies I have absolutely no interest in watching, but which I selected because they feature people speaking in Scottish accents. Thus far I've seen:

- Gosford Park (anh)
- Trainspotting (which is good but which I've already seen)
- So I Married an Axe Murderer (Mike Myers playing the dad is hysterical)
- Dog Soldiers (which by Christ is a terrible movie)

The most recent was Rob Roy, which was far from fantastic, but a line in it resonated with me: In the middle of the movie Jessica Lange says something to the effect of "That which can't helped must be endured," which is a motto I can cling to. She did, however, say the line in reference to being sexually assaulted by a 17th-century English nobleman, and that's an experience I'm on-course to avoid. It would take a time machine, an ill-fitting petticoat and a lot of Macallan's.

Shortly I'll be off to roll my R's and lighten a bottle.

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Last month I got no less than five bottles of Scotch for my birthday, a combined 3,750 milliliters of both blended and single-malt. I go through it a few milliliters at a time in the evenings. Once when I didn't have work I drank it in the morning, but the rest of my day didn't go right so that experiment went unrepeated.

Drinking is weird, so is eating. Absent whatever sparse contributions to society I've managed to cough up on a given week, I am basically a middleman between consumables and sewage. Distillers in Scotland put whiskey into bottles and ship it across the Atlantic, where it makes a brief pit-stop in me before ending up in New York's septic tanks. Ditto with food.

Middleman. I've said this before, but sometimes I feel like I'm just walking around generating laundry and turning body soap into dirty water. Money passes through my fingers, movies play across my retinas and music enters my ear canals, exiting the body through foot-tapping. The times I feel most alive are when I'm laughing or making somebody else laugh, and if I could get paid to do either I'd spend the rest of my life punching that clock.

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Today’s soundtrack: believe me I am falling

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Today at 11:52pm: gawking

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Dude I just saw the craziest thing. And I just fell in love. So tonight was a good night, because those two things happened in almost the same moment.

It's almost midnight on a Saturday and I'm walking around Chinatown. Got headphones on and am blaring After Hours' "Almost Like Being in Love," completely oblivious to the world around me. I'm headed west on Grand Street and the sidewalk is jammed with tourists and pedestrians (they are *not* the same thing). Grand Street itself has been turned into a parking lot because they're doing construction, so there's just a long line of cars going nowhere, everyone leaning on the horns in the aggravated Manhattan motorist symphony.

I stop to rest the dogs on the corner of Grand and Centre and take a seat on the thick black railing. Watching the traffic snarl, which is backed up all the way down Centre Street.

Over the music and the horns I hear wailing sirens and see flashing lights in the distance. That in itself is nothing new, it feels like every other week something around here burns down. But this time it ain't fire trucks, it's cop cars.

Two of them slither their way up Centre and bang a right just in front of me. Another cop car shoots the wrong way up Lafayette in a serious fucking hurry and joins them. Two more come after that, one going the right way down Lafayette, the other coming the wrong way down Centre Street, and all of 'em got the lights and sirens going.

The five cop cars converge in front of me and hit the Grand Street snarl. They're only able to make it two blocks down Grand before the congestion makes further progress impossible so they all simultaneously grind to a halt. Then I see all the cruiser doors fly open and ten cops run the fuck down the street, hands on holsters.

So two things about New York; one, you almost never see more than two cruisers at a time going lights and sirens, and two, you almost never see cops run. That, combined with the fact that it's 9/11 in two days and who knows what those kooky fucking terrorists are up to, makes me think this is worth a gander. I pull my ass off the fence and make for the commotion, unable to believe it's in the direction I just came from. I had the headphones on and apparently walked right the fuck past whatever's on the boil.

At the corner of Mott and Grand a crowd of people has gathered, and I follow their gazes south, where some of the cops appear to be sweeping the street. But three of the cops are standing not five feet in front of me, arms crossed and looking pretty relaxed.

This is when I fall in love.

Two of the cops are dudes, one is a chick. A Chinese or Korean female wearing the NYPD uniform, about my height, with her hair tied back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She turns her face into the light and she's fucking beautiful. Not fragile-fashion-model beautiful, but real, clean, simple beautiful. If I had anything in my pocket that looked like a gun I'd pull it out and start waving it around just to get her attention.

But she doesn't notice me, none of the cops do. One is a white male, early 20s and short. He and the chick look like the rookies. The other male cop is a tall Chinese guy going grey at the temples. He'd look like one of my friends' uncles except for the military buzz-cut and the Glock. I'm guessing he's the Sarge. Anyways they're all staring down Mott Street at whatever the other cops are sweeping for.

"What's going on?" I hear a women say behind me. "What are we staring at?"

"I don't know," says a guy to my left. Me, I don't know and I don't care. I'm just standing there transfixed by this rookie cop, wondering how in hell I'm going to get her number. I'm guessing she's not allowed to give her number out on duty. I'm guessing she's got way better guys than me hitting on her, and maybe broke writers ain't her thing.

She turns her head a couple more times and I get to see her face, which seems to hit me harder each time. I can't believe no one else has noticed her. Window washers should be falling off of buildings, passing taxi drivers should be crashing into poles.

She seems pretty calm and not nervous. There's an automatic pistol strapped to her hip. I find myself wondering what her name is, what she looks like with her hair down. I stare at her slender forearms because they're the only part of her body I can actually see under that uniform.

Some hipster guy is standing to my right. "We've been standing here for two minutes and nothing's happened," he says, even though it's only been forty seconds. "I hope something happens!"

What a douchebag, I think, partly because I hate hipsters and partially because you're not supposed to say you hope something will happen; you just stand around and wait to see if you're going to have a blog entry or not. I guarantee you this asshole's from Ohio.

"Charlie-five, there's no callback," crackles a black female voice over one of the cop's radios. "Regarding that five-two, uh, firearm, Mott between Hester and Grand, two males arguing, there's no callback." At least that's what I think she said, I think there was some more numerical jargon sprinkled in there. (Sterling, if you're reading this maybe you can tell me what the hell a five-two is.) The only numbers I would have memorized at that point would've began with 917, 212 or 718 and they would have had to come out of the female cop's mouth.

But the "no callback" thing seemed to be some kind of dealbreaker, because the cops on Mott gave up whatever they were doing and strolled back towards the cruisers. The female cop and her two companions turned to join them. No, no! Why wasn't there a callback! Somebody do a callback! Somebody wave a gun around, fuck!

I watched helplessly as Asian Female Cop returned to her cruiser, the first one in the line, and climbed into the passenger seat. The white cop got into the driver's seat. That lucky bastard must have been so psyched to get her as a partner.

The construction had since been cleared, and the cruiser drove forward and past me, giving me what was probably the last glance I'll ever get at that woman. She was staring straight ahead, calmly. I'd shave years off my life if she'd look at me like that.

As they rolled slowly towards the Bowery I memorized the four-digit number on the plate of the cruiser, as if that would get me somewhere. Then I went back to my big, empty apartment.

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