Oh, Dios mio!

Last night my doorbell rings. Before I have time to walk the 20 feet from the piano to the door, it is ringing incessantly. Now I have a doorman that is supposed to screen all visitors and call up for permission to send up the visitor, but clearly this didn't happen, and I don't like people knocking on my door unexpectedly. It's a NYC privacy thing. This is why we have doormen. I open the door and there is this beautiful Puerto Rican girl of about 25 or so with her 10 year old son. It seems that she is from the Census Bureau and would like to ask me some questions. "Sure!" I say, knowing how important this is. She immediately begins firing questions at me, still standing in the hallway. I suggest that we move the party inside. After about 40 minutes of very personal questions, some of which I denied to answer, thank you very much, and 12 pages later, she finished. She didn't like the fact that I declined to answer some of the questions and spent a significant amount of time trying convincing me that this information was confidential and my government would NEVER use it in any way other than that which it was intended. Yeah, that didn't fly. I began telling her all about illegal wiretapping, arrogant presidents and the demise of the Constitution, an exercise in silliness considering that she really wasn't that bright. I did question her about the timing of the census as I thought it wasn't supposed to happen until 2010. But apparently the Department of Commerce and the City of NY sponsor this census and they do it every 3 years, and only 1 in 270 households gets to participate. Who knew?

After she finished she turned the form back to the front page where I happened to notice that this particular form that we had just filled out was intended not for my apartment at all, but rather the one across the way. I pointed that out to her and she responded by saying, "Oh, Dios mio," or some such expletive and her pencil eraser began flying a mile a minute over every personal answer that I had just spent 40 some damn minutes giving her, right there on my kitchen counter (the very same place that my roommate would to park his stoned ass a short 26 hours later and pretend he was Michelangelo Lloyd Webber, but that's another post). So there we all were, her, her kid, myself, and eraser dust flying everywhere, getting all cozy and laughing about the whole thing. I found out that "dad" was also a musician, and that today mom had bought the boy a cute little puppy for $800 and that it was making mommie sneeze and she was considering taking it to the pound. When the entire thing was all through, I think I learned more about her, her kid and her "kid's father" than she had erased about me and my "household." She left around 10:15 pm, and I could hear her banging on the door across the way 30 seconds later.

Cut to the following day.

I entered my building at 5 in the afternoon with "Tenacious D" blasting "F*#k Her Gently" in my ipod head phones when a small child comes running up from behind me and grabs my hand and begins pulling it hard, trying to get my attention. I turn around and see it's the 10 year old boy that was in my apartment last night. He is very excited to see me. I guess I hadn't really realized the extent of our bonding. He wants to show me his little puppy that is apparently helping out with the census today, as his mother was talking to the doorman, (puppy in hand) no doubt to torture another hapless resident. Oh, Dios mio!