Every Day an Adventure

Today, I looked for birch beer, and found none. I did find a sale on Tastykakes though, so I guess that was good.

I ate lunch in the food court at the Gallery and just soaked up the atmosphere. It puts me back to my roots. Seriously.

Went to Modell's. Phillies shirts were on sale. Sadly, this year's t-shirt player number design sucks butt, so I got an oldskool Billy Wagner shirt and a blue Pat Burrell shirt. Couldn't find a good Chase Utley one. I cry. The shirts were super-cheap, like $10 each.

After a little bit of a mixup, I met up with Stewart Clamen down at the Phillies stadium, Citizens Bank Park. We wandered around the stadium for a while. Stewart got dinner from the Bull's BBQ and I got the Bull's autograph ("My mom is going to be so jealous when she sees this!", I remarked). Mitch Williams was also at the park today, though he was going incognito (until they showed him on the big screen). We saw the Phillies game, where it was pretty much lost in the first four batters when the Astros scored four runs. The Phillies never quite caught up, because lefties own them and Andy Pettitte is a very good lefty. Final score was 4-3. There was much booing. Stewart and I chatted quite a bit, and he had this scorecard book where the first game was the opening game from the 1989 Pirates. Apparently, he doesn't go to games much. He did, however, have scoresheets from the 1991 NLCS, from back when the Pirates were good, and aside from that, it was a lot of Expos games. The 9th inning was fun and suspenseful yet again, but this time the Phillies did not come through. Billy Wagner did come out and pitch though, so I was overjoyed, and of course the people in the stands were being Phillies fans and yelling things like "Only 98 miles per hour? Billy, you SUCK! BOOOOOO!" How on earth they boo someone who comes in for an inning and strikes out three guys, I'll never know. Then again, they booed Mike Schmidt when I was a kid, too.

It was fun. Stewart and I took the express subway back to Walnut, then we walked to 9th and Chestnut together and he took PATCO the rest of the way. I got home, showed my dad my ticket with Greg Luzinski's autograph on it and he was just like "The Bull was there? No WAY!" Then he showed me a program he had signed by a bunch of the 1960 Phillies. Neat stuff.

It's 2:30am and my flight is at 8am, and I need to leave here at 5:45am. I might just not sleep and hope to catch up on the 6-hour plane flight. Sigh.

Well, today was a pretty good day, even with the last part of it.

I went to the Mets-Phillies game in the afternoon to see Pedro Martinez pitch against Jon Lieber. I sat in a section full of Mets fans. There was this one super-newyork-lady sitting next to me who was really nice but totally talked the accent. "Heeyah, look in da binawkyooluhs, look at Michael [Piazza], ain't he gawt the best smoile? He's so gawgeous." I had specifically asked for seating under the cover, because I figured it would rain. Because I did that, it didn't rain for the whole game. And the Mets won. I spent the game pretending to be a Mets fan instead of a Phillies fan -- I was wearing plain clothes, so there was no team commitment there. I kept score, and the people in the section kept saying things like "You must be a big fan. Look at Pedro! Were you here when he almost gawt that no-hittuh?"

The highlights of the game included Todd Pratt getting himself thrown out early on (it was a 1-2 pitch and Lieber threw what honestly looked like a third strike, but the ump called it a ball, and Pratt must have said something because next thing we knew Pratt was walking off the field and Charlie Manuel was walking on to argue, and shortly after that he was also thrown off the field. Lieberthal came in to catch and the game continued. Unfortunately, shortly after that Lieber walked the bases loaded and soon enough the Mets were up 5-1. Even Pedro managed to get a single.

The funniest moment was probably late in the game. Carlos Beltran got himself walked, and then stole second base -- I'm not even sure Lieberthal tried to throw him out. On the very next pitch he stole third base! So of course the Mets fans start chanting "STEAL HOME! [clap clap] STEAL HOME! [clap clap]"

Yeah.

After the game I got Nick a birthday present of a Pedro shirt. He's such a Mets fan and he didn't have any Mets shirts. What a shame!

I went to meet up with rkane after that. I got lost trying to get to where he works, but fortunately, he had more work to do. First I got lost by going the wrong way on the subway, and then I got lost in Bloomingdales, which is attached to the subway stop by his workplace. Bloomingdales is SCARY. We stopped by Neutral Ground after that to pick up some card holders, and it was full of Magic the Gathering players, who are also scary.

Mark, however, is not scary. Mark is awesomeness, and I really wish I got to hang out with him more, but that'd require being in the same city more often, which would also require things like me coming to town sometime when he isn't leaving town the next day. We went for pizza at a place called Lombardi's, which is in or near Little Italy. It had reeeeeeeally awesome pizza. Then we walked around town for a while talking, and for lack of anywhere better to go, headed back to his and Mike's place. There's a joke about how Mark kept getting bigger and bigger TVs all through college, culminating in this gigantic screen TV that barely fit through the door when they were in Doherty. Well, Mark's TV has grown even bigger now, as it's pretty much the ENTIRE WALL of the living room, with a projector.

We ended up watching Stuck On You, that movie with Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as conjoined twins. It was really really Farrelly-awful for a lot of it, and somewhere along the line it became entertaining. We were both shocked it got a 6.1 on IMDB, but as it went on I could sort of understand why. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it, but I enjoyed watching it and getting to comment all the times it was just like "aggh! this is so BAD!"

Mark walked me back to the subway, and we had a conversation about how real life sucks. It made me pretty sad and deep-in-thought as I was riding the subway back here, which may account for what happened next.

I took the yellow line to Times Square and went down to the platform where the red lines go. I got on a red train. I went to 116th. Normally I'd get off at 116th and Broadway and walk over here to 120th. Except, uh, I got out of the train and I was at 116th and Malcolm X Blvd. Well... I didn't remember seeing that road before but I figured maybe I had gone through a different exit. So I walked to 120th and started heading west. Except, uh... I was nowhere near any streets I had seen before. It was really confusing. I walked around for a while and started panicking since I also didn't see any cops, cabs, or white people anywhere.

I called Nick. He goes, "Uhhh... I better come pick you up. Think you can wait there for ten minutes?"

Turns out I was in the middle of Harlem wandering around alone at 1am. It was a pretty nerve-wracking ten minutes, but eventually Nick got there and got me and we got back here okay. I suppose it should be considered a testament to NYC being more safe nowadays that I was lost in Harlem alone for around 20-25 minutes total in the middle of the night and nothing happened to me.

Turns out I'd taken one of the wrong red lines. Sigh.

The other funny thing is that I had been thinking earlier in the day that I'd probably like living in NYC... now I'm sort of re-thinking that.