Now...the Big Apple feels like somewhere that's not quite so big, and where I could be at home with. Maybe because East Village is so different from Midtown, where I've always been - where it's swarmed with tourists and people, and..because maybe, people live there, rather than travel through. I liked it though, running through there, the Lower East Side (gawking at the art from the windows, good and incomprehensible alike) and through Chinatown. Oh, man. It wasn't where I'd been before - Grand and Canal, where all the restaurants are, but the outer edge, where the one-front markets are, the produce sellers and the wholesale garages. And it was like Taipei, crowded, people chattering, and that familiar, both comfortable and slightly disgusting smell. I kind of envy the people who grow up there or in Flushing, where you're more fully children of two worlds than can ever be in the suburbs here.

But I suppose this time was different because I was with people who made the city seem small, and you could roll out of the bed and go exploring with. And without them there, I'm not sure I would love the city as much - it'd be quieter, and lonelier. Even so, I guess New York's now actually on the list of places I'd like to try to work at next summer, and we'll see how the rest is.

And on people - for some reason, the woman I met walking through the tunnel pops up in my head a couple months later. I think I was still singularly unhappy that night, and maybe I reached out and asked her about the hand drum because she had that kind of serenity that only Asian mothers can have (even though she doesn't have children). I kind of want to find her, since she's in the neighborhood, and talk to her, and see if she's happy or content, me speaking in my broken Chinese and English and her too, even though it's weird to talk to random strangers (but isn't that how all friendships are made? - that intrusion into someone else's personal emotional space). Who knows, perhaps I'll run into her again, and maybe then I'll figure out why she's drumming for peace.

And mother dearest is being prickly and sharp again. I don't like it, but what can I do other than sit and grit my teeth and politely listen.