THE LATEST IMAGINARY EAVESDROPPER'S REPORT FROM NEW YORK CITY: A SEMI-FICTIONAL ACCOUNT FROM A FORMER BOSTONIAN CURRENTLY RESIDING IN TEXAS

---"I am trying to teach my 8-year-old daughter to learn world geography as quickly as possible. So each month I will sponsor one special dinner in our household that's dedicated to the theme of getting to know a foreign nation that Sherry hasn't studied yet. I will cook several dishes using recipes from that foreign country. I will also post a tiny flag on the dinner table that has the official flag design for that foreign nation. Sherry likes to joke that she should get extra credit from her social studies teacher for traveling the world just by sitting down at our family dinner table. And who knows? Maybe she'll be working for the State Department someday. Maybe she'll be stationed in France for most of her career, so I'll have the perfect excuse for traveling to France every year and pigging out on the food there."

---"To me, a truly generous mother will treat her daughter or son to a free teleconference video-display phone conversation with a staff member from the Embassy of the foreign nation that my child is studying in class. A truly generous mother would ask her son or daughter to jot down questions in advance that he or she plans to pose to that representative for a foreign country. For instance, if it's Japan my daughter is studying, I would urge her to jot down the question, 'What are the advantages to eating seaweed every week, as you Japanese people do?'"

---"His efficiency apartment in Manhattan is so tiny that Fred could suffocate just by going to bed inside his unit. It's not as if Fred is the only one consuming oxygen inside his unit. There are almost always several mice and cockroaches there who are also competing with Fred for oxygen. Fred is so used to seeing mice in his apartment that he's started naming them as if they were pets of his. He just can't get rid of them, no matter what he does. Maybe he should wear an oxygen mask while lying on his bed every night, to make sure he gets enough oxygen to get through the night safely."

--"I hate it when the mice and cockroaches crawl onto my bed while I'm lying alone on my bed at nighttime inside my apartment unit. But fortunately, they never bite when they get onto my bed at that hour. Maybe they're grateful for the cheese I've started leaving on a counter in the kitchen, as one way to placate my zoological specimen roommates. My long-term goal is to train them to stay completely off my bed at nighttime. After they finally stop hopping onto my bed during my sleeping hours, I plan to sponsor a party celebrating that major progress for me here. I might even do some research to find out which type of cheese appeals to my mice roommates the most, and then offer that cheese as an appetizer at the party."

---"One of the reasons I am suspicious about my current apartment situation is that I wake up several times per night with an unpleasant vibrating sensation in my anus. I don't own any vibrator of any type, and in my entire life, I have never once applied a vibrator to my anus. I sometimes worry that the CIA is out to get me, and has decided to torture me during my sleep. Or possibly it's a very sly organized crime group or very unethical and sadistic media company or some militant group that attempts to commit homicide in slow motion so that no one would ever actually identify it as a homicide. 'Death by natural causes', they are hoping some incompetent coroner will declare someday."

 --"You can always tell very quickly whether I trust my current Hispanic roommate here in Manhattan. All you have to do is open the kitchen refrigerator and look for my designated shelves. If you notice black Magic Marker lines drawn on any bottle or any container that appear to coincide with the current level of any given food item or beverage item on those shelves, this indicates that I myself don't fully trust that particular roommate. But I don't have any way of electronically surveillancing the entire kitchen in order to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that my own concerns about roommate Pedro from Puerto Rico have a legitimate basis in reality."

---"I need to develop an exotic hobby in order to meet New Yorkers who also have that hobby. I like the idea of joining their Exotic Hobby club for monthly meetings. I just have to decide which exotic hobby I could cite for myself that would give us a solid basis for getting together during our leisuretime and feeling a deeper sense of camaraderie than you normally get here. One idea I've come up with is to establish a Documentary Films Club. Each meeting, one of our members would show our entire group a favorite Documentary Film of theirs. That could be enlightening. It could also be very depressing, though, depending on what the subject of the documentary is. We could make sure we offer foods at our meetings that are natural anti-depressants. I have read that oysters can help a person avoid getting depressed, so I plan to offer oyster appetizers at the meetings I host."

---"I find it fascinating that with all the New Yorkers who've told me they have met Christ, they never tell me what Christ was wearing at the time of that meeting. New Yorkers are very fashion-conscious, so you would expect them to specify whether the Christ they've met was wearing sandals, for instance, and if so, did this witnessing of his fashionable sandals outdoors take place in 30 degree weather?"

---"My taxi drivers find me so interesting to chat with that they will actually offer to pay me for riding with them. It's good to sense that they find me entertaining. But it occurs to me that some of those drivers may have an ulterior motive. They may be trying to land a hot date with me. I need to decide in advance whether I will always say 'no' to any such hot date offer from my taxi driver. But there may well be a very rare exception in which my saying 'no' would be a mistake. In that situation, I would make sure that I pick a well-lit restaurant for meeting him on that date. I would also inform him in advance that I won't permit any physical contact with him of any type on our first or second date. Not even a handshake. That might be one way to keep everything from going out of control."

---"If you do get knocked up by a taxi driver, if you'll pardon my bluntness on the subject, the only consolation I can see is that he'll give you a very fast ride to the hospital when you need to make a sudden trip to the baby-deliveries ward. Taxi drivers in New York can always be counted on to exceed the speed limit for you, regardless of the situation. They're aspiring professional race car drivers driving taxis here until they land a deal for a gig at the Indy 500."