"You hear that?" Brian said

I stopped and listened. "The Ice Cream Man?"

"No," Brian said, "The Knife Sharpening Man...."

"Who?"

"The Knife Sharpening Man. He rides around in a little red truck and plays that music. He has signs on the side of the truck advertising his services. Haven't you seen him?"

I hadn't. But, as fate would have it, he pulled up and double-parked in front of our building. He was talking to our downstairs neighbor, who was having a stoop sale.

I decided that this was exactly what we needed. We had a set of old knives that had been left to me by an old roommate (that's right, Dawn, I still have 'em). The two biggest knives were dull enough that they were hardly any good, unless you wanted to kill a tomato in the slowest and most painful way possible.

I changed my pants, grabbed the knives and my wallet, and ran downstairs. It was like ordering ice cream, but instead, I brandished my large dull knives and said, "How much to sharpen these?"

The Knife Sharpening Man was an older gentleman, the kind of man who looks distinguished, except for the hair growing out of his ears. He squinted his eyes and said, "Ten bucks."

I made a small yelp. A little more than I thought it would be. But one was paying for the convenience. The Knife Sharpening Man was coming to me. I tried to smile like I thought that sounded like a fine price and handed over my big knives.

The first knife he appeared to work on for a long time. Over and over, he held the blade against the spinny wheel sharpener. Then he would lift it up and examine it. Touch it with his finger. And back to the spinny wheel. My upstairs neighbor walked by. He asked what I was doing. I told him I was getting my knives sharpened. He said he'd been meaning to take his into the city to get them sharped too. He asked me the cost, and when I told him, he said, "I guess you're paying for the convenience."

When I turned around, the Knife Sharpening Man handed me back both knives. I hadn't been turned away too long, so I immediately became suspicious that he hadn't even worked on the second. I handed over the money, and as I walked up the stairs and back to my apartment, I noticed that the first seemed only a hair's breadth sharper than it had been before. The second seemed exactly the same.

I told Brian this. I said, "Maybe I was being unrealistic in thinking that an elderly man in a converted ice cream truck would be able to sharpen these things into Ginsu knives. But still .... Ten dollars."

This evening, I decided to have a bagel for dinner. A nice, tough, New York bagel I had bought on the Upper West Side, because I can't seem to get good bagels in Park Slope. As an experiment, I took out big knife number two. It was a nice, crusty bagel. But I could barely get the knife through the skin. I had to work it back and forth like a saw, and even still, the bagel was getting squashed. When finished, my bagel looked like a victim of torture, crushed, lopsided, ragged at the edges. Ten dollars. Huh.

I have been walking around the city for almost six years now muttering to myself about how difficult it is to find of photo booth here. Three years ago we finally found one at the Penn Station Kmart, but after ten minutes of hoping and fidgeting and kicking, we were forced to face cold, hard reality: It was out of order. I was devastated.

But here we were in Long Island City, at a bar we had actually been to a couple of times before, the photo booth sitting quietly in a corner, so unassuming that a number of people mistook it for broken.

But it wasn't.

A fellow bar compatriot said, "Whoa. Three bucks. That seems kind of steep."

I calmly responded, "Oh, shut up! Do you know how difficult it is to find a photo booth in New York City!?!"

So the queen of the self-portraits and her goods-sport husband chalked up the money and sat for four shots of random bliss.

LIC Bar.... Who knew?

I replied (by email) flippantly that it was "very postmodern" of us.

My coworker turned around and said, "But what comes after that?"

"What?" I said.

"What comes after post-modernism? There’s modernism. And then post-modernism. What’s next?

This set off an office-wide debate. One of the problems was that none of us could really get a good handle on what post-modernism actually was to be able to know that what we were doing now was different, thereby giving us a hint at what it should be called.

The best we could come up with was "post-post-modernism", which seems to be the name equivalent of emailing back and forth with the person sitting right behind you.

I decided to ask my friend Sam, because he was Valedictorian of his high school class, and because he’s a bit of a know-it-all.

I called Sam at work and said, "So what the hell comes after post-modernism?"

He said, "I don’t know.... Reality TV?"

"Really." I said. "You're supposed to know these kinds of things."

"That’s as far as we got in school."

"I know. Me too."

I guess it’s as good an answer as any. Let me know if you have a any better ideas. But until then, we are in the post-post-modernist era of Reality TV.

Recently, I wore my black tulle skirt and I thought I looked rather smart. During the day, I found myself chatting with a near-stranger. Immediately following a conversational pause, she said, "I really like your skirt."

"Thank you," I said, smiling and making a "this old thing?" face.

"I really do. It's great looking. You know, I'm really into recycling too. I love old things, and I love finding ways to make them new again."

I stopped smiling. This was not the first time someone had mistaken an outfit composed of newly bought garments for something I had to dive and rummage for out of a Good Will bin. This woman was complimenting me on a skirt she thought I had sewn together from odd bits of used clothing. But I had bought it new. And had been under the impression that it looked the part until that moment.

I felt a little self conscience after this conversation. But not as self conscience as I felt an hour later when I was walking down the street, and an woman came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

"You're skirt..." she said, and I honestly thought she was going to compliment it. But instead, she said, "It's all pulled up in the back. I could see your bottom."

Horror of horrors! The tulle was still down, but the cotton slip had crept up as I walked and was now bunched and clumped, reveling areas I had assumed were safely covered.

The rest of the day I spent occasionally tugging at my skirt to make sure it was covering what it should. And I was relatively successful until the end of the day, at which time I left the office with my head full of errands. Moments after stepping onto the sidewalk, a random woman came running up to me, saying, "MISS! MISS!"

Again, with my head in my own thoughts, I thought she was frantic for directions. But then I heard, "You're skirt!" and I knew what this was about.

Maybe it was the static caused by the specific combination of my stockings and the skirt. Or maybe no one had before had the decency to let me know that, wearing this skirt, I looked like a loose-moralled bag lady with a revealed hindquarter.

I swear I've gotten real compliments on it before. People have said they liked the skirt. They have understood it was a new and bought item. Still, I think I'll give it a rest for a little while.

MomCentral, who is a Florida State Rep, gave testimony, and DebCentral read it. This was tons of fun.

I took some pictures. They looked like this:

I think everyone should get involved in politics. Because it gives one an outlet to do public speaking, to be heard, to be in the spotlight for a moment, but unlike community theater, one doesn't have to sing or dance or wear unnatural pancake makeup.