Waiting to Get There. Usually on the A/C/E in Chelsea, New York City.

  the image google returns when you search for "sofa in a small salon waiting room" I go to the salon on 20th Street the other day. I sit myself in a chair in the waiting area nook. The only other seating is a small sofa. I say this to highlight there is room for three, max. (This might make your brain quake as much as mine because the photo above is of two sofas. This photo is therefore not representative of the actual situation. But I'm way too lazy to find a more accurate representation. So. Yeah. Here we are.) Right after I sit down, a young woman plops herself into the sofa across from me and casually tosses a large metallic silver weekend bag on the other end of said sofa. Hopefully no one else needs to sit down because the angle of the toss effectively takes up the entire other end of the sofa. Intentional? Not intentional? We shall never know. One of the salon assistants comes over and places a cup of hot tea on a saucer in front of the woman. He says, "here&

Honestly I missed the whole thing. I was literally in the closet -- picking out a pair of pants. Maybe because the closet is small and everything is packed in there like the softer side of expert level Tetris, it was the safest place in Manhattan in the critical 4.8 Quake moment. However, the reason I was scoping out a set of trousers was because I had an appointment in midtown. It only occurred to me while I was sitting in the subway train uptown that possibly taking the subway thirty minutes after an earthquake might not be the smartest idea I've ever had. But, ya know, I was already on the train so at that point, might as well go for broke and continue my travels, as planned to Bryant Park. Eight minutes after I got off the subway, I had the exact same mental dialogue. Except this time I was in the elevator riding up to the 33rd floor of a skyscraper. My entire morning could be entitled : Safety First? Wait what? Anyway.  Tom felt the earthquake. First he blamed the upstairs nei