A correspondent of three or four years recently moved back to NYC, his home town, after several years away. He introduced himself to me by sending payphone pictures from midwest locations, including an interesting shot of a payphone inside a prison, Not the one in the lobby which the public could use but the actual prisoners’ phone. Gutsy shot for which I almost got him into trouble by stupidly attaching his name to the photo in the form of a photo credit.
He has recently been sending payphone pictures from Woodside. I asked him if he was living/working/staying in that area, and suggested we meet up for a couple of beers at Donovan;s or wherever. He responded that he does not drink and is homeless, quickly adding that he sleeps on a couch on 60th Street in Woodside. I interpret this to mean he is staying with a friend and not “homeless” in the way most people tend to assume. Statisticians (usually with political bias or some agenda) lump together people without a lease, people with no permanent address, or people who simply do not register on the public record as being “homeless” even when common sense dictates they are actually quite homeful.
I knew a guy who lived like that for a couple of years, sleeping on a couch just a few doors over from his former place of work. He called himself homeless during those years.
This gentleman in Woodside went to the same college as I, though I think he did not finish. i would have to review our correspondence but i seem to remember he made a comment about how he couldn’t finish because he was not rich enough, and that most of those kids got through on daddy funds and paying full freight. The conventional wisdom is that students whose parents can pay full freight will always be admitted ahead of those would require scholarship funds or endowments. I do not think there is a lot of truth to that, though it is hard to imagine that college admissions boards do not occasionally resort to something like a a coin toss in situations where equally qualified students differ only in their parents’ ability to pay full tuition.
Man, college seems like a lifetime of lifetimes ago.
Whatever the case it should be interesting to meet a fellow payphonista and college alumni, and in a part of Woodside I happen to wander over to a few times a month.
At a Starbucks but heading home to catch up on payphone detail. So far spent the day writing about anything but…
Keeping careful about the blood pressure. It blasted off last night to where I had to take a pill, which brought it down but still caused major insomnia and borderline horrorshow nightmares. It’s crazy because my BP, until about 3 years ago, was nearly catatonic. It was like less than 90 over less than 70, and it had been that way since college. I guess things change — and it’s no help that this is probably the worst period of my life thus far — but relying on pills to artificially bring BP back to earth should not be the solution.
