Why if I had half a chance, I could make an entire movie using this stock footage.

Back home again, even after the hellish rains Tuesday night/Wednesday morning that flooded everywhere but Manhattan (and since my airport was in Queens that was something of a bitch). But our flight was not til 1:00, so by late afternoon things seemed to be up and running, albeit slow as shit.

One gem during the trip to the airport was the aggressive and terrifying large black woman who got on the bus and nearly had an altercation with the driver, the details on which we're fuzzy, but it ended with her making her way back (and sitting behind us, joy!) and muttering loudly, with lots of "Fuck him!" and then the occasional, "'Scuse me, doll," as she got to a seat.

She had a friend with her, and even though she was right behind us, we only got the gist of the conversation, (98% of which was her), something about her son doing eight years for attempted murder and she told him, "If you're gonna shoot, shoot to kill the motherfucker, then throw the motherfucking gun in the river, shoot the motherfucker..." and on and on. With a brief intermission of how she tells her son to talk to God and God's watching him and he should have conversations with God.

I found it vaguely baffling. How does God feel, after all, about killing motherfuckers?

She finally got off the bus (ah, after yelling at the driver at one point, when the bus was getting very full, to "give me and my girl our money back!" and muttering about how she had her pistol on her, etc etc) and I was a little surprised when no one applauded at her departure. And then another woman stood in front of us and I had a really hard time not staring at her boobs, which were pretty much just not in her shirt at all, really, including a nipple. I was delighted to get to the airport.

And then there was this LINE at the airport. The kind that, the moment you see, you know it will be your doomed fate as well, even when you don't know what the damn line is for. You know in your heart, "We will have to stand in that in a moment." And we did. And it actually moved quite rapidly, even though its length was such that it made the whole airport appear as if it had been fucked about eight times with a chainsaw. Naturally people were freaking out.

We got through the line, through security, and actually made our flight. It was a fuckin' miracle.

But more importantly, we got to see Jon Stewart! It was a lot of fun. We got there an hour before their suggested "arrival time" and I'm so glad we did. The interns stationed themselves outside and handed out free bottled water for everyone and the early birds got popsicle things, I am unfamiliar with their exact name. But they were tasty.



Shitloads and shitloads of people showed up. Security was ridiculous, I even got wanded--though it should be noted the security people had actual personalities and were nice, something I suspect that may have to do with payscale.

We were seated directly across from the desk, halfway up, very awesome seats. Everyone was told that if you took out a phone, a camera, even looked at it, it would be taken away (and given back at the end, they said, unless it was an iPhone). A man stood in front of the desk and watched everyone as we all waited for the seating to finish and things to get rolling. It was really bizarre and I can only assume this is what he was looking for.

We got a "warm-up monkey," as he called himself, a guy who came out and got everyone to cheer and applaud, blah blah, and then threw in a fifteen minute comic routine, which was actually hysterical. Shortly thereafter, Jon Stewart came out and did a brief Q&A, something I think he is a very good sport to do, considering that people are morons. I even told D before we went in that I would probably end up hating people just a little bit more after the Q&A, and hey, I did! I won't bore you with some of them, but let's just say the man has skirting and dodging down to an art. I'm not sure he actually answered a single question (and rightly so) except the ONLY vaguely intelligent question, "What do you do the last half hour before the show?"

Jon Stewart strikes me as someone who is very nice and whose niceness has been hugely abused by stupid obsessive asshole fans and he's clutching to his last shred of patience. His discomfort of doing the Q&A was nearly tangible.



The show was lots of fun, our correspondent was John Oliver and sadly, Jon Stewart did not check in with Stephen Colbert at the end as they sometimes do. In a very strange way, watching the show from the audience was a little like watching something in a glass case. Watching the show on TV, it always feels like there is a rapport between Stewart and the audience, but we felt very removed from the whole process, as if we were just there and this show was also going on. It's a small studio (waaaay smaller than on TV, of course), and yet there was very much a feeling of a fourth wall.

Regardless, it was entertaining as hell. Our guest was Andy Samberg, star of Hot Rod, and the SNL performer who, as I understand it, is behind the writing of "Dick in a Box", "Lazy Sunday" and the Natalie Portman rap. He was a funny enough fellow.

(The Natalie Portman Rap, NSFW)


The rest of the time in NYC was also plenty of fun. Drew had to work nearly the whole time we were there. We navigated our way around the city and the subways with shocking ease. We went back to Battery Park to relax and look around, ate in Little Italy, and went to the Museum of Sex.



They had a really great photography exhibit called Disability & Sexuality. The other two galleries showcased a vast range of fetishes and sex in media throughout the years. I didn't even realize some fetishes were so narrow in scope as to have their own name. One involved sitting on cakes (sploshers, NSFW, duh, which I think is more food), one involved mudbaths and then there was pony play, altogether different from BDSM or furries. Clown fetish. Balloons. And adult babies, one of my absolute favorite disturbing things of all time.

And now to return to the daily grind of a shitty job...