Some photos from the weekend protests (primarily from the United for Peace and Justice march on Sunday).

On Friday the train to work was less crowded than usual, due to the exodus caused by the coming Republican National Convention. The streets are a little emptier too. I wonder how many New Yorkers have to leave the city for their absence to be noticeable. A lot, certainly.

They have been replaced by cops, who are sprinkled around the subway stations, while blimps and helicopters are sprinkled in the sky. The helicopter noise is amplified by the buildings of Manhattan, which echo the sound like boomerangs. At night, they announce themselves with searchlights that paint the city in revealing white stripes.

So many ways to show your opposition to the current administration, and to the RNC itself. I've spent time both in the middle of it and outside of it, recognizing purpose and importance and creative responses, and sneaking away to the unaffected parts of the city for balance.

I saw the end of one march and participated in another (the sky was blue and hot), spent a rare (and pleasant) evening with I., watched political documentaries in a parking lot in the Lower East Side (helicopters buzzing by like insects), weaved through the middle of a loft party on roller skates (no one else had any wheels, but for some reason I was okay with that), went to a political art opening that served No-Busch beer (the "No" was added to each can with red ink), sat on freshly laid turf grass on Stuart's roof among several of his friends (presenting ourselves for introductions), and listened to Dan C. over dinner as he told a chain of amusing stories, pulling them out of nowhere like magic rabbits and making the rest of us laugh.

Among other things. My weekends are too often like a size 12 girl trying to fit into a size 6 dress, cramming and stuffing until the seams bloat. Simultaneously unrealistic, satisfying, and exhausting.

It turns out that I am not the only one in the building who feeds the gray stray, and, man, am I totally outdone. Lately I've been throwing a handful of food outside my window in Pavlov response to the stray's meow. Of course the food bounces and scatters in the alley, but the cat finds it, scurrying around in what looks like an Easter egg hunt in fast forward.

Today I noticed my neighbor's brilliantly simple contraption, one that even I may have been able to engineer, had I thought of it: a cheap baking pan and a really long string. The pan, which is cradled by the x-shaped string, is filled with cat food and then slowly lowered down from the fire escape like a bucket in a well. Naturally, after the cat is finished eating, the pan is retrieved. I'd be a little jealous of my stranger neighbor's ingenuity, if I weren't so busy admiring it.

I was sitting by the window this evening when I saw the pan float past, on its way up. Later, after dutifully tossing out some food for the cat, I looked up and saw the pan beginning its slow descent.

That animal has no idea what it created.

I'm not in my twenties nor am I in my thirties. I am 29, which most often is pronounced: "AL-most THIR-ty." It's a fine year, as far as years go, but that has nothing to do with my age. If it were just about my age, it'd be a wasted year, because while I am technically still in my twenties, my brain has already sorrowfully said goodbye to them. Nevermind the fact that I still feel, probably look, and (in many ways) act as if I'm securely in the midst of that decade. (Which of course invites the question, what is one supposed to act like at 29?)

If there weren't numbers attached to me, I probably wouldn't even think about my age at all, and I honestly don't think it matters all that much. I think the most troubling thing is that, besides whatever societal norms and expectations I'll be faced with in the coming years (whether or not I'm ready for them), I am now going to get obnoxious age-related birthday cards. (To my parents: I apologize for ever giving you greeting cards that humorlessly mocked your age, and for, when I was little, wrapping items you already owned and giving them to you as birthday presents.)

For the remaining two-and-a-half months of 29, I am going to try hard to convince my stubborn brain that I'm indeed still in my twenties, and not somehow floating in between two decades. The first step will be striking the phrase "almost thirty" from my vocabulary. While I'm sure 30 will be fine, there's no reason to get there early.

I often carry a can in my bag, in case I see any stray cats. There are so many stray cats in this city.

I do it as much for me as I do it for them; it's so satisfying to watch a hungry animal excitedly fill its belly with food that you set out for it, and it only costs 50 cents. Fifty cents will buy you gum, an apple, a Homie, a piece of zucchini, four Miss Pac-Man lives, or a full cat belly.

There is an alley along the back and one side of my building. The door to the alley is always open, which means that anything that can get into the alley can get into my building, and vice versa. So far, the only creatures I've seen in the alley are cats. I've only seen one cat ever enter the building, and it darted back out as soon as it saw me.

Last night around 2 a.m. I was standing in my kitchen, near the door to my apartment, when I called my cat's name, attempting to coax her out from under the bed. My cat didn't respond, but a cat in the hallway started meowing like a fire truck. I opened the door a couple of inches and saw a desperate-looking striped gray animal rubbing up against my door frame. "Hold on," I said, and ran to get the food remaining from my cat's pre-diabetes days.

I squatted in the doorway, offered handfuls of food, and watched as the stray ravenously gulped down the pellets and produced strange little cat grunts. I sat there for a long time, doling out handful after handful; its appetite was impressive. "It's a stray from the alley," I said to a neighbor, and then another, who passed by. Each smiled.

The cat sucked down food like a vacuum cleaner, affectionately butted its head up against my hand, and resumed, before eventually disappearing. On my way to bed, I left a small amount of food and water in the hallway, just in case.

This morning the remaining food and water were gone. Sort of. Some of the food was there, but in a slightly different form, as if it had been mixed with acid from a cat's stomach. Six piles of it.

I swept it up.

I have an inexplicable weakness for actors in 80s movies, it seems, including characters that don't really exist or younger versions of actual people. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that I have a crush on the past itself. It's rather frustrating.

The blue donkey told me to think of a question and instructed me not to tell him what it was. I was then asked to blindly pick from a bouquet of slips of paper; the slip I chose would provide the answer to my question.

They'd been printed from a computer, using 8 point Times New Roman in black, and they had a sentence on the front and lucky numbers on the back, like a Chinese fortune. I know that the slips weren't all identical, because the girl who went after me read hers out loud.

Mine said, "Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be part of." It seemed appropriate, considering the question I'd come up with: "Why are you dressed like a donkey?"

E. and I struck a deal that he would drive me around the city while I took flattering pictures of him. Although I love public transportation and don't often think about the lonely Honda parked in my parents' yard, driving and cars have taken on new meaning for me since moving to New York.

They mean that places I generally think of as distant are minutes away. They mean windows down and breeze and autonomy, freedom from bus schedules and wistfully staring down the tracks for the train. They have become like that special treat that your parents used to let you have only on rare occasions—yes, I'll let you stay up late tonight, but we're not going to make a habit of it.

(Driving and cars still mean lots of negative things to me, too, but those concerns are dustily shelved away for other, car-dependent cities.)

So we went from DUMBO (in Brooklyn) to Queens to Roosevelt Island and again to Queens before heading back to Brooklyn, all of it seeming unusually close. Because the three of us were getting along well and being funny and mostly because we were in a magical automobile, the day had that rare movie-like quality, like that scene in bad romantic comedies in which the main characters are shown driving on the highway in a convertible, laughing and listening to a catchy ballad.

...

The morning of my two-year anniversary in New York (last Tuesday), I walked out of my apartment directly onto the set of a police video, which I immediately regretted not being able to watch get made. I imagine serious expressions poking out from under hexagon-shaped navy hats and fake car chases, or at least fake handcuffing, gun pulling, and looking carefully around the corner with the barrel inches from the face.

Also on my street this week: political street theater and impromptu bike jousting. This is by far the most lively street I've lived on, and that's not including the almost daily neighborly chaos on the sidewalks and stoops.

...

On the anniversary of the blackout, I watched some blackout-inspired amateur films in an appropriately dark and dank room. It was so crowded that I had to watch the films from a spot just inside the men's bathroom, which (fortunately) was pitch-black and (unfortunately) in use.

...

At work they passed out little tote bags for us to keep at our desks, full of emergency items such as bottled water, a flashlight, and a dust mask. This package would be cute, like mini-shampoo bottles are cute, if it weren't inherently disturbing. Hello RNC.

...

I don't have many guest roaches, and the ones that do drop by usually hang out in the kitchen or in the bathroom. Which is why it was alarming to find one in the back room while I was sitting at my computer. But the truly alarming thing is that not only was it not intimidated by me, but it crawled up my bare leg. Unaware of what was tickling my shin, I "scratched" my bare leg with my bare heel, which effectively stunted the roach and sent him flying to the floor. Bad bad bad.

I've been making some (still unrevealed) changes around here and it's completely eaten into the time in which I would normally write (or pay bills, clean my apartment, cook a proper meal, or sleep).

I'd suspect that I was semi-turning into a machine, if it weren't for the fact that every single muscle in my body aches (as a result of returning to yoga after an 11-month absence). Or that at one point today, when I was riding through Harlem in a breezy cab literally stuffed with basketball players, I was so in the moment that I dug my fingernails into my palm and sunk into the surroundings—the R&B music gliding through the back seat speakers; the warmth of the person sitting next to me; the wind pouring over the child-safe window; the wide, busy streets of another majority—and thought, You're going to remember this. I don't know, though, whether it was a statement or a command.

I meant to walk my bike over the Williamsburg Bridge. Instead, I kept riding, slowly, absorbing each expansion joint with a bumper car-like jolt. I didn't make the decision to cross the entire bridge; I just never made the decision to get off my bike.

Most of the time, I forget about the slightly chipped tooth that the bridge chiseled last September, but for some reason, as I crossed the East River, I kept my tongue pressed up against the rough enamel, perhaps as a message directed at my left hand: stay away from the front brake; don't think independently.

It wasn't so bad. I think this is something that's going to get easier the more I do it, kind of like killing roaches.

The end of the bridge was like the mouth of a river, spilling us out into the more uncertain Manhattan Ocean. We quickly threaded through the Lower East Side, East Village, and Chelsea, avoiding potholes and surprise car doors, and observed the Saturday afternoon sidewalk traffic.

We drove west until we hit the Hudson River Park Greenway, where we turned north and traced the outline of the water, coasting past an aircraft carrier and sailboats, through tunnels and woods. There's nothing quite like a straight, carless bike path to make Manhattan seem rather petite; it seemed to take no time before we'd biked through a chunk of Riverside Park and reached 95th Street.

I like going places I've never seen before, in part because of the lack of prior memories, and because I don't overlook details that I think I already know. The second visit is always colored by the first.

Later we pedaled through Times Square, which was in the process of a busy Saturday night. The people, the cops, the cars, the horse-drawn carriages, the double-decker buses, and certainly the lights converged into one sweeping blur. For some reason, my bike made the place seem smaller than it feels on foot.

When we walked out of the movie around ten, we came across several guys break dancing in Union Square. They stood side-by-side facing the same direction, each taking his turn in the empty space in front of him, between the line he'd stepped out of and the people who'd gathered to watch.

They twisted their bodies into impossible and enviable positions, making it look somehow feasible for humans to balance on the top of their heads and spin on concrete like wind-up toys. I always wish I felt more connected to the performance, and perhaps to the break dancers themselves. I don't particularly like feeling like a flat, gawking spectator. Perhaps I would need to be the pavement underneath them, or the boom box.

I'd seen that group before, or at least a few of them. One of the guys is quite chubby, and has the signature move of flashing his stomach by rapidly lifting up his shirt and rolling his belly like a centipede.

Even though I have no plans to leave New York anytime soon, lately I've been looking at it sentimentally, as if it were my last month here, as if the time had come to catalog every corner and every smell—the terrible smell of a handful of incense all being burned at once, of sweet roasted nuts, rotting trash, and freshly baked pretzels. I've also been trying to absorb abstract things like multiculturalism and lifestyle, futilely attempting to file them away for later. I've been trying to memorize Now. I'm not sure why.

When I was in second grade, just in time for school pictures, I accidentally shaved off one of my eyebrows. I was sitting in the bathtub when I bumped a razor that was perched on the edge of the tub, causing it to fall in the water with me. I distinctly remember grabbing the razor and placing it back on the porcelain rim. I distinctly do not remember the razor ever coming near my face, but when I climbed out of the water and saw myself in the mirror, I was horrified to see that I was short one eyebrow.

My mother came to the rescue by painting a faux eyebrow in the vacant space above my eye, but of course it didn't look at all natural, so we opted not to buy the school photos that year. (It's really too bad, because it would be nice to have a copy of those.) When my face eventually recovered, my mom took me to a photo studio for a re-make of my second grade portrait.

My turn came years later, when Richard got a square bald spot shaved into the side of his head. I colored in the bare scalp with black eyeliner.

Lately my cell phone has been giving me little clues that she's elderly; she's only three years old, but, one by one, her faculties are fading. Her ring is now strained and raspy, her light no longer works (which often makes it hard to see who I'm calling or who's calling me), and she's even been randomly restarting herself, like a fickle computer.

Today at lunch I reluctantly shopped for her replacement in the Sprint store on the first floor of the Flatiron Building. I really don't care about having a color screen or a built-in camera or that my phone stands out as a model from another era, and I'm quite attached to the odd British police ring that Sprint must've phased out shortly after my phone's birth. I must admit, though, that once I saw the shiny compact flip phones on display, they started to look competitively appealing, the way that young and sexy tends to outshine old and faulty.

As it turns out, I am not eligible for the advertised phone discount regardless of how many contracts I'm willing to sign and regardless of the fact that I've been a bill-paying Sprint customer for three years. The smug man who told me this was sitting behind a counter, reclining in a chair, belly popping out over his belt. "You can get our cheapest model for $150," he said with a shrug. I ultimately shrugged back and walked out with Grandma Sprint, whom I hope will live to see mid-2005, when I'll finally be "eligible." ...maybe I'll make a deal with ebay.

...

Tonight A. and I talked over pizza and garlic knots under garish fluorescent lights. We were sitting in a typical long and skinny pizzeria near Union Square, lined with red and green glowing neon, with walls of mirrors strategically placed to make the establishment seem larger—infinite, even. While I patted the grease off my plain slice with a square napkin, A. described what it was like to live in Africa in a hut without electricity, and how it felt to descend into a cave in New Zealand.

I decided some time ago that I didn't want to be the sort of person who envied other people's choices, but the sort of person who actually makes the choices that appeal to me. I've done that so far (more or less), but I feel pretty foolish for not leaving the country since returning from Germany four years ago, especially since it's impossible to do everything that interests me, and since I'm not sure how many more years I'll be something of a transient. A start: a trip I'm planning to Mexico for early autumn is coming together. (It'll be my first time there.) Looking at tour books makes me impatient.

During a spoken word performance that I saw several years ago, I recall Henry Rollins saying that whenever he looks at a world map, the countries he hasn't visited jump out and audibly mock him.

If you ask me for directions, I will eagerly draw you a map of the entire area and include every landmark you'll see on the way. You want to know the word "cat" in German? I may give you a short (and unsolicited) German lesson, which will include spelling and pronunciation, and possibly even a bonus list of other animal words you didn't ask for.

If you compliment my shirt, I will feel oddly obligated to explain where I got it and, if it was particularly cheap, how much it cost. If you'd like me to explain how to optimize pictures in Photoshop (as my dad did Saturday morning), I'll overwhelm you with "helpful" information by trying to teach you every nuance I've learned about the program since I started using it years ago.

I'll consciously try not to bombard you; instead, the information will quietly float to the surface and turn into an innocent aside.

When I was teaching English in Berlin, I knew that one particular class was most interested in learning British English. I was happy to expose my students to the British dialect whenever it occurred to me, but I could not prevent myself from explaining how American English differed in each case, which certainly only confused everyone. Instead of simply telling them that an occupied phone line was "engaged," I would feel compelled to articulate that Americans would instead say "busy," and that "engaged" is reserved for someone who's about to get married. (And they would respond by staring blankly at me.)

My intentions are good—I want you to know what I know, or what I wish someone would've once told me—but I hate to think that I might come across as obnoxious.

Sometimes I'm able to successfully curb the tendency, but it always makes me feel like I'm withholding vital information, or like I'm keeping an uncomfortable secret. (Because, really, knowing the word for "dog" in German is pretty crucial if our communication is to be successful.)