There’s an amusing article in The New York Times about dating and book preferences — what titles/authors are the dealbreakers? Some say, as long as he/she reads…I haven’t dated too many readers, which makes me sad now that I think about it. But I can’t help but think of one particular dating experience I had a few years ago. At the beginning of the date when we were getting into the job discussion, I mentioned that I wrote book reviews. His horrified response: "Wait…you have to read the whole book?!"

It was a long night.

Jennifer Leblanc

Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh defined mindfulness as keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality. I’ve been working on that; it’s so much harder than it seems.

Focusing on the current moment and not worrying about what comes in the next hour, day, or week is counterintuitive to life in 21st-century New York. (Really, 21st-century anywhere. You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that even Easter Island, a place so remote it is 2,500 miles from any other land mass, now has high-speed Internet.) My M.O., I’m embarrassed to say, usually involves something like simultaneously eating dinner with the radio on to hear what’s happening now, watching TV with the sound turned down to get the weather for tomorrow, and reading the newspaper to find out what happened yesterday.

So I’m conducting a small experiment, and I’m doing it on the subway. During a commute I decided I would just ride home. I wouldn’t distract myself from the present reality with a book or music or falling into a strange state of semi-consciousness, a condition that seems to befall me during these winter months when I leave for work in the dark and come home from work in the dark. (Note to self: this topic deserves its own post.)

I tried this twice last week with very interesting results.

Both times I chose the evening commute because it’s the time of day I am in the most need of decompressing. After a hectic and stressful day at the office, I generally spend my subway time in lament of the fools I’ve had to suffer during the day and the ridiculousness that is often the multi-national corporation. (Motto: Red tape is your friend.)

At first I found myself at a loss of where to rest my eyes. The ads rimming the cars only hold your attention for so long. I couldn’t very well overtly look at people. In other places, it’s welcoming and friendly to look someone in the eye. In New York, especially on the subway, it’s an act of aggression. But curiosity killed the cat, as they say, and I ended up stealing glances at people I thought interesting enough to take the risk.

Across from me was a woman reading a magazine. She wore a sort of half grin that never faded, not once during my ride. A green paisley scarf was wrapped around her head in a sort of swashbuckler way. I didn’t see any tendrils of hair peeking out from beneath the scarf, and I couldn’t help but notice that her eyebrows were missing and her skin was completely without the faint peach fuzz we all have but spend a lot of time and money to keep under control. Had I been engrossed in a book or newspaper I would have never noticed. I wanted to tell her, “I see you. You’re not just one of many, part of the masses (leading lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau would point out).” Then my writer’s brain checked in. That’s where I start filling in the blanks when not enough information has been provided to me. Maybe she is in remission after many long months of treatment, thus the smile. A happy secret she has all to herself. Or maybe it’s too late. She’s been given a sentence — two weeks, a month, three months. Her smile instead is a wistful one, thinking of all the things she’ll soon miss that she never gave a second thought, like riding the subway for instance.

I transferred to the 2 train, which was oddly empty, so I sat between a woman nodding off and a heavy-set man. Upon further investigation, he wasn’t heavy at all. In fact he was quite thin. He just seemed thick because he was wearing every piece of clothing he owned — at least three shirts and two sport coats on top and two pairs of pants, plus several layers of socks. Like a little kid extra-bundled to play in the snow, he couldn’t bend his arms at the elbow. It was definitely chilly outside, but I guessed this was an effort to thwart potential thieves wherever it was he laid his head.

He mumbled something and made a quick exit which gave me the opportunity to notice a mother with a stroller. She was young and pretty and thin, so I immediately thought: nanny. But no. The diamond on her ring finger could have been used as a method of self-defense. She had long, black hair and swung her head in such a way that made me wonder if she had been watching too many Cher videos. But even that didn’t irritate me as much as her need to narrate her every move and schedule for the rest of the day’s events to the little girl, who might have been all of two, in a sing-songy voice at a volume for the rest of the car to hear. “Let me put your binky in my bag. We don’t want to lose it, do we? No, we don’t. I’m just going to put these mittens on you. Okay? Okay. I’ll put the mittens on. Here goes the left one. Putting on the left mitten. Now the right one. Right. Right. Right. I should comb your hair. This is a comb. C-O-M-B. You want to look so pretty for your play date with Tyler, don’t you? I’ll drop you off there and pick you up before dinner. Then we’ll have mashed potatoes, your favorite.” In a few stops, they left the car and I could hear her voice trail all the way down the platform until, mercifully, the doors closed.

I know this isn’t exactly what Thich Nhat Hanh had in mind when he wrote of staying in the present moment. In fact, he admonished people whose minds are like monkeys “swinging from branch to branch throughout the forest.” But I’d like to think he’d cut me a break as a novice on the road to mindfulness.

Jacquelin Cangro

While walking down Splatter Street recently, my friend Guthrie remarked that she is seldom acknowledged by other Americans. We had just walked by two white girls living in my neighborhood of Mapo in Seoul. I’ve never said a word to them either.

She’s from Minnesota. I think people are a lot kinder there. They smile and even wave at passersby.

Guthrie is in the throes of culture shock. She went to a huge department store recently and couldn’t find anything that fit. Not even in The Gap, that bastion of Western casual wear.

"Nothing fits my boobs," says she.

Guthrie will soon hit her five-month mark in Korea. It gets a lot easier after that.

Westerners can easily find things to complain about in South Korea. We’ve got it so good we just can’t help but complain about the handful of things that suck. One of the things that suck: other foreigners.

"I don’t even like hearing them in the subway," Guthrie says. "It annoys me so much that I try not to talk on the subway anymore. They’re so loud. I don’t want to be like them."

She is a contradiction. Guthrie would like to get a smile from a white girl passing by. But she doesn’t like to hear flocks of them speaking the English while on the metro. This is fairly common. Despite our similarities (number one being living in a polarizing Asian culture), we stick to our cliques. It’s like high school. But everybody is the socially-awkward-sexually-repressed-culture-monging fringer. We just find like-minded subdivisions within that domain. That’s a given here, along with the following:

1. Christian married couple (late 20s) paying off debt and saving for a house. Recognizable by their conservative khaki pants and sour expressions.

2. Uber-educated, 30-something females unable to find intellectual equals back home who decide inside instead to pursue their careers and cultural enrichment abroad.

3. Middle-aged pornographers with a hankering for the innocent Asian girls.

4. Hot young guys willing to teach English for a year to hook up with innocent Asian girls. Recognizable by their public hand sex in coffee shops.

As much as I dislike the stereotyping…there you go. Part of establishing your identity while you’re in another country is acknowledging that you are what most annoys you in other people.

Becky Ann Bosshart

I understand that it’s hard for people who get into their cars and drive to work to sympathize with the plight of the public transit commuter. Take Monday, for instance.

I had to return two heavy and awkward wall shelves to a store in Manhattan . They totaled 22 pounds. When I had purchased the shelves on my lunch hour, I deposited them in my office, and took one home at a time. It seemed like a drawn-out process to do the same on the return trip, and I’d postponed the inevitable long enough that my 30-day refund policy was about to expire. Monday was the day.

For those of you tooling around in a vehicle, you would pop the shelves into the trunk of the car, and this would be the end of the story. But not for me.

I put each shelf into a separate bag, banged them down 5 flights of stairs from my apartment, slugged about one-half mile to the subway station, banged down another flight of stairs underground, and squeezed through the turnstiles.

Did I mention it was raining? Of course it was.

By the time I reached the station the shelves and I were soaking wet (can’t use an umbrella if you’ve got a shelf in each hand). Not giving it a second thought, I’d used paper bags which quickly disintegrated into a soggy mess. So I then hoisted each shelf under an armpit. I was thankful at least I wasn’t wearing light-colored pants which would show every drip and drop of mud below the knees. This is something not mentioned in your “Big Apple Welcome Packet" when you move to the city, but you learn only after a few bad thunder/snowstorms. On the train, I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, propping the shelves up against the pole.

This wasn’t the first time I’d carried a ridiculous item on the subway. One memorable experience involved an aerobed. In the store, the aerobed seemed manageable, light even. The clerk attached those fantastic plastic handles to the box, necessity being the mother of invention in a city where everyone has to carry everything. The subway station was a mere two blocks. I barely made it to the corner before I had to stop to rest, panting and heaving worse than an emphysema patient. When I reached the station and made the long flight down to the turnstile, I gave up. I perched the large box on the edge of the top stair and gave it a swift kick. The box tumbled, flipped and skidded to the first landing. I did it again (it felt so good) to the bottom of the stairs.

A large man, who looked like he burrowed holes in the ground for a living, had been watching me. “Can I help you?”

Sweat dripping down my face and back, I nodded yes. Oh yes! He carried the aerobed through the turnstile and all the way to the platform, then turned and headed back up the stairs to another train line. When I finally got the thing home, pushing it along the sidewalk, I noticed on the side of the box the product weight was 30 pounds.

On Monday no one was offering to help me with my shelves. But I made it. Sure, my mascara was streaming in lines down my cheeks, my hair was a tangled rat’s nest, and my fingers were swollen red sausages, but it didn’t matter. I made it and I vowed right there that on Tuesday I would bring to work nothing larger than my cell phone.

Jacquelin Cangro