Lost in Penn Station

I was supposed to go to New York for work with a couple of work colleagues, and I was walking through Penn Station with them. We were in a hurry - in my head, I was thinking that we were going to miss the train from Princeton to New York (even though we already were in New York). Even though I was a daily commuter through Penn Station for 5 years, things looked familiar but confusing to me now. I took them down a set of stairs to what I thought would be the lower level, only it went down directly to the tracks, and instead of being full of other train riders waiting for the train, it was full of homeless people, people just loitering, drinking, and doing drugs. Instead of walking back up the stairs to back track, we thought we could cut through to a staircase we saw down the line that lead out to the street. However, in order to do so, we had to step over homeless people, squeeze past scary looking men hanging out on the steps, etc. Nobody really harassed us that bad, though some dodgy people tried to talk to us. When we got outside, I saw it had put us out on 37th Street, about 4 blocks north of the main Penn Station entrance. Again, the city streets there looked completely different than what I was expecting.

Sliding and ripping my purse

I was at a New York City museum with a set a very tall, very steep steps. I'm talking scary, almost vertical steep (I think this stems from watching the Top Gear Bolivia episode in which the TG guys drive down an almost vertical incline of sand to reach the coast).

I started going down the steps on my butt step by step, only this was even getting difficult as the steps themselves started getting smaller and narrower. I saw a handrail, so I thought my best option was to move over to the handrail and slide down it like a fireman's pole.

As I started sliding, my handbag got caught on the railing. I tugged at it, and it ripped (though none of the contents came out), and I went on my way sliding down. When I reached the sidewalk, I surveyed the damage. It was a patent vinyl black sack, and one of the handles had ripped completely. Inside I had been carrying around (who knows why), this vintage fur headband that a friend's mom had passed on to me -- and that was ruined too.

Andrew McCarthy, pregnant women, and Peru

I was at a lecture with my mom and aunt. The room was sort of like the old lecture halls in McCosh at Princeton. Andrew McCarthy came up to me and said hi - apparently we had gone to high school together. When he left, I told my mom and aunt (in Chinese) that he was a movie star and we had gone to school together. They said that I should invite him to have dinner with us after the lecture. When he came back, he had notes scribbled on paper and gave them to us. He said these were his ideas for a movie script.

Then I was with my friend who was pregnant and wearing a gray seersucker sheath dress. She was thin and looked great - just the baby bump. I realized that I had been rude in not congratulating her sooner on expecting. Her 2-year-old was running around under the dining room table - he was proportioned like a 2-year-old but only about 1/2 the size, like a miniature kid. I tried to pick him up and he was tiny.

Then I was at some tourist site in Peru, walking along a trail full of other tourists. There were red llamas, and small buffaloes. There were also horses running down the mountains, followed by jockeys on foot running after them. I thought, I should take some pictures... Then the clouds broke and it started to rain hard, so I made my way into a building. It was a hotel, and there was a woman checking in who looked like a girl I went to high school with - at least from the back. She was pregnant and wearing a slinky black cocktail dress with cutouts, only because she was pregnant the dress didn't fit and she only had it halfway zipped up. She and her friend started talking to me - first about how quickly the weather had changed, then they also had a bunch of CDs of local pop music and wondered if I wanted them.

Anti social vampire me

I was on a flying bus with a bunch of other people whom I didn't know. The bus landed itself in front of a city hotel, and I started to get up to get off, and the other people on the bus looked at me like I was crazy. We need to pull into the garage first, they said. This, I realized, was because we were vampires and we would have fried in the sunlight.

So I checked into the hotel, and had to share a room with another fellow vampire stranger. We were next door to more of our kind who were throwing a big party, and I hated them all.

Random snippets

I ran into 4 people from work at a local cafe - they had just come from bible study at the University chapel, and asked if I was interested in joining.

My stuffed animal pig turned into a fat, little pink baby.

Conference or sleepover?

I was at a conference, only at times if felt like I was a kid there with other kids. At meals, it was a bit like worrying about whether you were sitting at a "cool" table in the cafeteria. I had the vague sense that some of my high school girl friends were there, but I hadn't found them. We had one workshop that was in an art studio, with a bunch of artists. Then when it was time to spend the night, we all slept in sleeping bags in the art studio.

Black Swan skin

I had little red wormlike spots all over my shoulders and down my arms. Kind of like Natalie Portman's budding bird feather skin in Black Swan. And on my back were growing a few huge barnacles with fluttering gaping mouths. It still makes my skin crawl just remembering this dream...