On Sunday, I went to the Queens Zoo in Flushing Meadows Park with a couple of friends. We witnessed some interesing psychodrama between the two bears above. The bear on the left, who I’ll call Billy Bob, was lolling around in a corner, collapsed in a depressed little ball. The bear on the right, named Mandy, went up to him, no doubt to cheer the little party pooper up. But instead of snapping out of his funk, Billy Bob got all ticked off in a “bitch, you know nothing about how I’m feeling!” way like so:

Mandy was all like, whatever, see if I give a damn about your existentialist dilemmas, and lumbered away…

… and Billy Bob sobbed even harder. Poor bear.

I spent a good deal of the weekend on the 7 train. In addition to my trip to the zoo, I also went out to Flushing on Saturday to buy phone cards to dial my boyfriend in Taiwan with. It was an interesting experience. I thought the N/W was pretty exciting, what with the two blind accordionists and one folk singer who play on it regularly. But the 7 train was a total madhouse. First there was a guitar player who belted out the Beatle’s “Yesterday,” who was immediately followed by a woman, dressed head to toe in a long black dress, who walked up and down the car pleading for money. She nearly crashed into one of those young boys not selling candy for no basketball team (I’m always curious if these kids are forced to say the exact same thing).

I was wondering if the 7 train was usually this crowded with candy sellers, buskers and panhandlers when a man in a screaming loud purple shirt pushed through the doors and started on the longest, most hyperactive spiel about the wonders of Jesus that I have ever been subjected to. It was a thing of wonder. At one point, he tapped a little boy on the shoulder and asked, quite insistently, “Isn’t Jesus better than Barney? He is, isn’t he? Better than Barney?”

While the delicious irony of him yapping away about Barney while wearing a bright purple shirt nearly forced a smile onto my urbanly detached countenance, I was ticked off. I would be absolutely livid if I had a small child and some stranger tried to proselytize him or her by verbally blasting the poor kid into a corner on a crowded subway train. I yanked out my iPod and slapped my headphones over my ears, but not before I heard preacher dude yell, “It don’t matter if you’re black, white, Asian, Dominican or Mexican! Jesus is with you, up in heaven. FA SHIZZLE MA NIZZLE!”

And then the dulcet tunes of early Phil Collins took me far, far away. Thank God for iPods.