Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the meaning of cool

“Does this mean we’re cool?”

That was my wife’s question after reading a review — she couldn’t find the link afterward and neither could I — of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” one-woman show that referred to the audience as “hipsters.”

Since we were going to see it at Soho Playhouse in New York, she wanted to know if that made us cool by proxy.

That is, of course, if you think hipsters are cool, and not (as we do) the living and now scientifically proven embodiment of “You laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at you because you’re all the same.”

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No plan? No problem!

Decision time … at an intersection. Left or right?

“There’s a mass of humanity that way, and a mass of humanity that way.”

“You’re in Manhattan. There’s going to be a mass of humanity wherever you are.”

“True.”

We went right.

Random thoughts on a train to New York

The wait, the countdown, the anticipation — all over.

I’m on a train, Kacey Musgraves coming through my headphones, on the way to New York City.

My wife just pointed out the waterfront passing by near the Rhode Island-Connecticut border. It’s pretty nice.

Would I repeat my mistake?

Years ago, I went to a Jamaican restaurant with the woman I was dating at that time and another couple.

I saw that the jerk chicken dish was just chicken and rice, but since I didn’t know what jerk chicken was, I asked my date, and she said it was sweet.

Sounded great to me, so when the order came, I cut up the chicken, mixed it with the rice and took that first big bite …

Senior days

There aren’t enough hours in the day to answer all the polls and questionnaires that pop up on Facebook, but for the record, I have no tattoos or piercings, there are a lot of foods I don’t eat and in addition to the two states where I have lived (New York and Massachusetts), I have visited 24 states and Washington, D.C.

But when I saw a survey from a friend about senior year of high school, I figured it would be fun, especially since I have a reunion coming up this year.

So here goes.

An ode to ice cream

The other night, my wife told me that something new was coming to town, and challenged me to guess what it was.

I didn’t have the foggiest idea, so I made a couple joking guesses — I think a baseball stadium may have been one of them — before she revealed it was an ice cream shop in a plaza on the other side of town, about 10 minutes away.

This was good news indeed.

Happiness is where I let it happen

Years ago, I worked with a young woman who was always happy, always smiling.

She was sweet, but it drove me nuts.

As I told my brother, who worked in the same place but a different department: “It’s like they know something we don’t know.”

“No, we know something THEY don’t know” was his reply.

No, that’s personal … that’s why I’m calling!

I apparently have a friend who’s very concerned about my Social Security number.

After all, why else would he have called me — on my personal phone, no less — five times in roughly 24 hours to tell me my number would be suspended.

And from five different numbers, to boot.

The cast of characters in life’s grand pageant

A longtime character returned to the office for the first time in a while.

But he’s someone I’ve never seen, and no one else I work with is sure they’ve ever seen him, either.

Past lives and reunions

For about nine months, I spent between and hour and 90 minutes every morning and afternoon mostly staring at the rear bumpers of cars.

I had started a new job before moving to where I live now, and the highway wasn’t equipped to handle the traffic, even with the addition of the breakdown lane as a traffic lane during rush hour — such a Massachusetts thing to do instead of … I don’t know, coming up with ways to lessen congestion or make it more palatable.

Also, for most of that time, there was a construction project that had been going on since approximately the first horse path was carved from the ground and may have just been finished.

Needless to say, I don’t miss it.