So I forgot to mention – there’s a very small window in the kitchen that I opened last night to let some air get through the apartment. Across the way, there’s a window that opens into another apartment – they are about 3 feet apart.

Apparently, the tenant who lives there likes to lean out the window and talk, sing, and yell sometimes. He has a soothing, low, spanish-tinted voice while he’s talking or singing, and I haven’t heard him yelling, but apparently he freaked Levi out one night by shouting into the alley. He doesn’t seem to be dangerous or particularly angry or anything, he just likes to talk into the alleyway.

The other weird thing happened this morning, and this one has actually bothered me, although I think I handled it alright. A guy sitting a chair or two down on the subway started chatting with me this morning. It was a fine conversation and quite friendly, but something about it put me off – he was being too friendly. He was a larger guy, with a beard, and looked fine and trustworthy, but there was something odd about just how open he was during the conversation. We chatted about New York, and he asked how my stay was so far, and inquired about what I was up to in the city; all fine. But he asked for my number twice (I refused), and invited me to tour the city with him (also  refused). I told him straight up that I wasn’t comfortable sharing that with a stranger, but when he tried to get my number twice it really set off the alarm bells.

I can’t tell if he was just gay and hitting on me – there’s no problem with that – but there was a certain element of what can only be described as “stranger danger”. I turned him away without any personal information except a broad sense that I lived in Brooklyn. Thinking back on it now, I mentioned that I was attending Hacker School, which could be dangerous. Best and most likely case, I never see him again. New York is a big city.

The whole thing has been bothering me all day. I’m the kind of scared that makes me want to carry some sort of defense item (can of pepper spray?) on the subway now. Maybe it’s good that I had this encounter and nothing happened, so that I’ll have the proper amount of respect and fear for a situation like this that happens in the future. I’m sad that I’m going to be more wary with random encounters in the future.

I set aside Budgeted this morning and spent all day working on the One Fun Thing, which is Wander, a tag game I’m building in node.js and a pure javascript frontend. I’m excited to say that it’s mostly done and should be ready to show off during the presentations tomorrow. I also might make a zombie mode, but I’ll do that after I get the tag mode working totally.

I’m at Hacker School right now just surfing the internet and watching WCS SC2 – the internet here is a lot better than at my apartment.

From Manhattan,

–Erty