magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

In the full-length mirror, on the way out of the house, I notice what I'm wearing: brown dress shoes, jeans, a heather pink t-shirt peeking out from beneath an almost too-small, cotton with 1% spandex, brown button up dress shirt, my new black fall jacket from Banana Republic, but looking so 2001 Prada. Every piece is, in itself, stylish. Together they seem mismatched, but still somehow all fit. They're all new clothes since I've been in NYC, but so very classic Bean.

At the archive, sipping my shot of espresso, a girl starts up a conversation with me. I notice that her drink (we're all regulars at this point in the morning, and no one actually has to order anything out loud) involves espresso and soy milk. She asks about the new issue of McSweeney's that I have with me. Asks if I have ever been to any of their readings. 'There's a bar they used to hold them at,' she says. 'I don't know if they still do.'

'They've opened an educational center,' I tell her, 'in Brooklyn. Like the one in California. They have after school writing programs for kids, but also hold events there.'

'Readings?' she asks.

'I think so. I've never been.' I feel that I'm not responding correctly. That I'm being cold and stand-offish. It's not that I think she's flirting or anything. She was playing with someone else's dog on her way in the door. We're all neighbors, regulars at the same coffee shop, these are the people one should be friendly with. I finish my espresso and leave and we don't say anything else.

I'm on the subway platform a little later than usual. The train that arrives moments later is almost empty, with plenty of available seats. The seats on the L are benches that fit roughly six people between a set of doors, three on either side of pole. I follow a girl through the train doors, another neighbor I've never met. We both sit on the bench to our immediate left, she at the pole, I at the door, a space between us.

A few stops further on, the car having filled up a little, she slides down into the empty space. I think that this was to let a couple sit next to each other on either side of the pole, and not to keep the space between us from being filled by someone else. I never really looked up from my book. In my peripheral vision, through the hair that falls in my face when I'm reading on the subway, I noticed that she was also wearing a layered, perhaps questionably matched outfit.

We both got off at Sixth Avenue. I followed her out of the train, up the stairs, but passed her in the tunnel to the red line.

---

And bleeding into my Monday, a residue of Sunday's blue tint. A true sort of sadness. Not depression in the way that depression numbs you to all emotional response. And not that overwhelming frustration, in the face of which all you can do is pace back and forth and want to scream or break things until you either compose yourself or break down into sobbing hysterics. But that sort of sadness, that blue, that sense that the tears are always there, lurking behind your eyes, on the verge of spilling out just a little.

I felt it between home and the Archive. Again walking into work, Coldplay on the office stereo.

Around lunchtime it was supplanted with feeling sick. Headache, nausea, maybe a slight fever. The inability to focus on anything. A trip up to the plaza. An afternoon that dragged on and on. Finally leaving the office at 930, a fraction of what I had hoped to get done.

---

There was a bunch of MTA guys in the 14th Street tunnel installing new poster boards along the wall. I had never actively noticed the lack of advertising in the tunnel until confronted with its end. It's a shame. The subway is saturated with ads, and any respite, whether registered consciously or not, is welcomed.

And on the L: a girl with a small pumpkin carved with the letter R.