Good question.

Nice face.

Lately I’ve been “taking care of some paperwork,” i.e. sorting through 100s of generally worthless digital photos I’ve taken in 2007. A lot are from the subway. Most are outdated. But the above ad for Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), which has bugged me for at least six months now, is still up there in many subway cars. So I’d like to point out how COMPLETELY FAKE (I’m pretty sure) it is.

Right? No way were those four peeps in the same original shot. MAYBE two of them knew each other. The rest is total Photoshop, and by the way thanks Photoshop for making me wonder if this particular school regularly rewards its graduates/fake friends by flinging them into a blurrily distorted pit of flames. (I know metaphorically that’s what all colleges do, but this ad is quite a literal interp of “Welcome to the real world, bitches!”) Too literal, I say. Throw a tree in there or something.

The girl on the left’s in an entirely different LAYER. Who the F was she laughing at in her original photograph? That dude got gypped.

Until about 2005 I used to write that word as “jipped.” I like to think it’s because I’m so inherently not racist against gypsies, but really it’s because I just didn’t know any better. I tend to float along in my own realm, pausing only to point out all the pretty head scarves and giant gumdrops in the ether (they’re there!), so I’ve ended up missing the boat on so many words/phrases that people with merely average IQs all know. “Youth in Asia,” anyone? Ugh. It’s not even funny. I should compose an official list.

At least I know Photoshop terms like “layer.”

Who does this?

I wanted to cry.

And it wasn’t even mine.

If your breakfast sandwich goes splat and you can’t bear to touch it again, the least you can do is kick it onto the tracks. Then other commuters don’t have to look at it and get even hungrier. Plus, rats just love bacon.egg.and.cheese.

Despite there being 20,000 other places for me to stand and wait for the train, I ended up leaning against the column nearest the breakfast sandwich (BS). Each minute was sadder and sadder. Out of anything to show up in my life at that moment, why did it have to be a destroyed BS? I mourned the wasted food, the pain the BS must have suffered from the shock, and the fact that I wasn’t currently eating it. I could even smell the bacon. That bacon looks crunchy.

I even played a challenging mind game wherein I counted out how long I could look away from the BS until my eyes darted back again. (19 seconds.) That was fun, especially the self-loathing periods right after I caved.

Wait, is that shredded lettuce? What kind of BS is this? I call bullshit.

I don’t usually enjoy or even bother to examine subway ads, but this one was pretty well-done. Allow me to translate as it’s a touch blurry: “Everyone has to grow up. It is a fact of life. Don’t be scared of it. Just make sure your apartment grows up with you.”

Even though the design made me chuckle, I call bullshit on both ideas: That people’s friends look down at them because their apartments are too cluttered, and that people should care even if their friends do think that. It’s New York. No one’s surprised to walk inside a studio and see piles of crap (left), mine especially. Yes, visitor, my extra-large-for-some-reason futon does happen to puncture your thigh as you step through the door. So what? It likes you. There’s a place for you to sit and a toilet. Get over it. I don’t need to hear that it’s small, or that you “really like the exposed brick.” People usually tell me both things — the latter purely out of pity. It’s oddly reassuring.

Note to Manhattan Mini Storage: No one in Manhattan whose apartment looks “scary” has too much stuff. They just don’t have any space to put their normal amounts of stuff because evil powers much like yourselves charge them inordinate amounts of money to occupy indoor space in Manhattan. I ride the subway because sometimes it’s fun to roam around such a huge space with more than one partition. I do it to forget the low-lit troll cave I just minutes ago escaped. A reminder that I live in a freaky dungeon is simply uncalled for.

I really need to move to Brooklyn.

Sometimes I use the Internet at work. Not often, just for research. Like when Rebecca and I send each other links to obscenely expensive bags over Instant Messenger (a newfangled computer program I’ve recently started using).

On the Coach site, there’s a “try this bag on” feature which I originally found rather cute and helpful. But then, for “fun,” I selected the 4′11″-5′4″ height range instead of my own, and was horrified to compare the two resulting diagrams.

Does anyone else think this looks disproportionate? The mini-me short girl might as well be the six-year-old child of the gargantuan taller one. Plus, who the F is 4′11″?

Despite the new law banning photography in the subway, I risked my life and this website’s flailing reputation to snap a shot of this ad for Manhattan Mini Storage:

Okay. Fine. As uncomfortable as the thought of “BURNING YOUR CROTCH!” while riding a crowded subway car is, I tolerate this ad because it includes a large spaghetti dinner. But let’s look closer:

The spaghetti area is the only portion that has literally been peeled away. This means that someone was bored or hungry enough to longingly scrape his or her nails against the poster as if it was scratch-’n'-sniff or something.

I respect the effort (though I personally would have gone for the garlic bread first), but I wonder if finally peeling away the top layer of poster was at all gratifying. To me, that’d just be a huge letdown: No, it’s really not food. You lose. Maybe it would have been better to just wonder and wonder and never find out.