Rainey Blogs on Some Days

Today I ordered my coffee at the Starbucks at 78th and Lexington on my lunch hour from training a new seasonal package helper. It's expensive on the Upper East Side , so each day I'm bringing my lunch, which I eat along with a coffee at Starbucks while I sit and look out the window at the people passing by. Today no seats were available in the store when I ordered—which I'm finding is quite common in Manhattan--but as I walked toward the rear of the store not knowing what to do, a woman with a baby in a stroller got up and left. We made eye contact and smiled, a mutual understanding of my good fortune of being at the right place at the right time. I went right over and took the seat, a nice leather bench against the wall. A job interview was in progress on my right—a twenty-something professional Jamaican man was being interviewed by a twenty-something American woman. He looks like a young Forest Whitaker , whom I had recently seen in the movie The Last King of Scotland . I...

Today I'm eating lunch out again since Marcia gave me $25 yesterday and told me to start doing it. It's hard to bring your lunch when the temperature is only in the 20s and your lunch sits in a vehicle all morning, leaving it nice and chilled by the time you eat it. So today I get to splurge on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Yesterday I ate at a Subway. Today I am at the Elim Cafe located on Lexington Avenue between 64th and 65th streets. The temperature has been freezing cold this week, and the problem with both restaurants is that each has small seating areas near the front door. On both days, I've been getting blasted with arctic air each time someone comes in or leaves. This is made worse by the way New Yorkers come in and out of a restaurant, acting as if they are all somebody . ( I know, some of them are.) You can see this in the way they fling the doors wide open and strut in, as if every one of them is Brad Pitt or Angeline Jolie. It would be nice if people wou...

On Wednesday, I sat down next to a woman in the Starbucks at 78 th and Lexington facing the window looking out. The Manhattan Starbucks are all so crowded that you have to sit next to someone. I took the one seat that was left at the window, grateful to get a seat because earlier in the week I had spent one lunch period squatting down leaning against a wall in another Starbucks, waiting for a seat while my feet fell asleep and tingled like crazy. The woman was feverishly journaling in a notebook, exactly the thing I had also intended to do during my lunch hour there too. I journal on a black steno pad that I carry around with me most of the time. I was wearing UPS browns, taking a break from training a new helper on how to deliver packages. Since it is New York, no one seemed to think it strange that a UPS guy was journaling on his steno pad. I can't remember ever seeing a man journaling anywhere , let alone a man wearing a UPS uniform as I was. But everyone just pretty much leav...