People, Performances, and Pebbles

I'm a people watcher. It doesn't matter if I'm in class, out with friends, at a restaurant, home in Ogden at a football game, or walking on campus in Ames, people intrigue me and I have to stop myself from staring sometimes. Being in a place like New York City is a people-watcher's heaven. There are sooooo many people! I did some quick research on Wikipedia (shameful, I know) and found some numbers on the city's population. Check out these statistics:

• New York City has been the most populous city in the US since 1790
• The city has 5 boroughs: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island
• Those 5 boroughs cover just under 305 square miles. (Boone County, Iowa covers 574 square miles...269 more square miles of space than NYC)
• Living in the area of 305 square miles is a population that exceeds 8.2 million people.(Boone County can only boast of approximately 26,224 people living there)

Now that my usual places include the subway, walking down the streets in the morning and evening to and from work, the gym, Central Park, a student housing building similar to a college dorm in Midtown, an apartment in Harlem, non-chain restaurants, and a few touristy areas, I have been on overload of observations of the people around here.

A friend here in the city, Emilee, and I were relaxing in Central Park over the weekend and she was telling me about some of the highlights she has witnessed in the park. One of my favorites was the story she told about seeing a guy who was running, on his tip toes, wearing tap shoes. Why, you ask? We'll never know.

One of the editors at Scholastic was encouraging me to walk around the area around the office down here in the Soho neighborhood. She said that lots of celebrities tend to be nonchalantly walking around. I asked who she had seen- Jack Black pushing a baby stroller was on her list.

And because it deserves a paragraph of its very own, the subway has got to be a highlight. My brother Thad and I share a love for the movie Men in Black II. In one of the beginning scenes of the movie, Will Smith is going to the rescue again to keep a giant worm from consuming the entire line of subway cars running beneath the bustling city above them. Jeff, the worm, is finally taken out and Will Smith, or Agent J, must re-do all of the people's memories so that they won't remember the giant worm eating their subway car. Fortunately there haven't been any subway-eating worms since I've been here, but I have enjoyed hearing multiple foreign languages being spoken, watching people nap, napping myself, and even getting a front row seat to the performance by a group of teenage boys with a boom box that after an annoucement of "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a little show for you!" they proceeded to break it down to some hip hop music complete with dance moves. Everyone has a talent and these boys wanted to share their talent with our particular subway car. Lucky us.

Yesterday after work I met up with another fellow Cyclone who is interning in the city and happens to live in the same building as me- what a coincidence! But guess what? I was coming around the corner from the laundry room on Monday night and saw another familiar face. We had worked together on a project in one of our Journalism classes and here we were in the same building. Apparently she is living with another girl from Iowa State so that makes a grand total of 4 Cyclones who all came to New York on separate agendas and ended up living in the same building-what a small world!

Natalie, one of the fellow Cyclones, and I grabbed a sandwich for dinner last night and then topped it off with a stop at Pinkberry, a frozen yogurt chain around here that offers 3 flavors of frozen yogurt- Original, Green Tea, and Pomegranate, and then you can put anything on it for toppings, from kiwi to Fruity Pebbles cereal. Yum!