Since it's much too loud for the parents to hear over the SCREECHING, I'd like to appeal directly to the source: babies, please stop crying so much. I know you're hungry and uncomfortable. I know that your mom wants you to sit on her lap because the bus is so crowded. But it's about a zillion degrees outside and a zillion percent humidity, making it feel more like a zillion and four, and I'm smashed into this bus that's lurching and dragging itself up Broadway like a dying animal.

I guess it's your right though, as a baby, to cry, and maybe I'm just jealous that I can't start crying on the bus anymore. It makes me think 'I hate babies,' but then I look over at you, your gleaming, cried-out baby eyes, your brave little baby forehead. You're too cute to hate. So please, just stop crying so much.

I'm sorry, babies. I'm just venting. It's because of this heat. I didn't mean to take it out on you. Today was like a death wind, barreling through the fortress canyons of Midtown. Walking along by Port Authority at three o'clock people began to stagger down 9th Avenue, from shadow to shadow, rushing across the blazing sidewalk in little groups. It seems dangerous to be alone in that kind of heat. If you get bum rushed by a crowd and fall down, or even stop in the sun to tie your shoelace, the heat could just take you, turn you into a skeleton. It's a biblical kind of plague heat. It feels like punishment.

I got home and went into the bathroom to watch the beads of sweat roll down my forehead, racing for my eyebrow, dripping off my jaw. I'm like a cold beer in this heat, dripping and sweating all over the tile. I propose that New Yorkers should have coasters for themselves during the summer, to keep the sweat from getting everywhere.

I'm not from here though, so maybe that's why I'm bitching so much. Maybe real New Yorkers just get used to it, but I still haven't. It's weird, I'd always associated sweating with physical exertion, but here I am sweating, just standing here. It used to be, when I got home from a day like this, I'd rush into my room and pull off my bag, socks, shirt, to cool down. But now I know to just leave it all on. It'll soak up the sweat. Just sit down, be cool. Open the window, turn on the fan, wait. If you have a cold beer in the fridge, crack it open and drink the best beer you've ever tasted. That's the stuff.