"There's a man stealing a bike across the street from me," I said. I described him, hung up, and waited by the window.

Four minutes later the police arrived. "Sir," they said, "we got a call that you were taking a bike."

The man looked confused and explained that the bike was his; the lock had been stuck. He waved goodbye to the cops, got out his keys, and entered the building across the street.

Before I go to work I always get coffee at a corporate cafeteria. This morning an older couple sat across from me. They had symmetrical breakfasts: two coffees, two OJs, two pastries. They ate their food in silence and without looking at each other.

Yesterday I waited in a subway station to catch the 6. A woman next to me bit her nails neurotically. Another man loudly sucked on a toothpick, a blind man wandered around while nobody helped him, it smelled like garbage and the platform was dirty.

There's a scene in Repulsion where, after Catherine Deneuve's date kisses her, she leaps out of the car, wipes off her lips, slams the door to her apartment, scours her mouth with a toothbrush, and paces for a couple of hours. I had the same feeling when the train came. I turned around and walked home, wasting the fare.

When things reach a certain point of misunderstanding (like the bike incident), or mechanization (the couple eating breakfast) or ugliness (subway station), I feel like expatriating myself.

Cafeterias are sad because they do absolutely nothing to elevate your existence. Old European cities, to pick an extreme example, are nice for the opposite reason-- they have a history that lends import even to really banal activities, like eating breakfast.

When there's no sense of time, it is easy to feel like your gestures are wasted. Eating breakfast in a cafeteria doesn't connect the act of eating breakfast with a tradition-- with all the breakfasts that have ever been eaten and all the people who have ever eaten them-- in the way it might somewhere else.

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