Tuesday, 26 November 2002 | Alphabet

J's apartment was broken into. Apparently nothing was taken, just lots of stuff dumped out and strewn around. The surprising thing is that the doorknob to her apartment was completely replaced.

S drives a cab, but not the yellow sort. It's not actually legal for him to pick people up off the street, but he does anyway. He's from Senegal, and has a thick accent. "Oh, I not really supposed to do this, so pay me...don't pay me...I don't care. I'm just driving around."

Y likes to pretend he's from another country, so he introduces himself using accents, believable or not. I got his old Jewish woman accent, which was not believable.

M is a 45-year-old in a 25-year-old's body. He likes talking about the cooking section of the New York Times, which he reads religiously. "Did you happen to see the article about the chicken stuffed in a duck stuffed in a turkey? It sounds superb, but it requires that you de-bone three birds." He wears stiff navy dinner jackets, smokes lots of cigarettes, swirls his drink around, and uses expressions such as, "I'm of two minds about that."

T is looking for an apartment. She told me that in one day alone, she saw two (unrelated) rooms for rent that had 4-foot-high ceilings. One of the ads said, "Think: Being John Malkovich."

When people ask G what he does for a living, sometimes they think he's joking. He tells them, "I'm an ice skater, and I make paper mache masks that I wear when I skate." But it's true.

(a few of the random people from my weekend)