While You Wage Slaves Scarf To-Go Chicken On The 9:07 To New Haven, The Slackers Of The World Laugh . . . Ha

The Times reports on how the expanding workday is forcing commuter train lines to adjust their rush-hour schedules:

The first train of the day pulls out of the Croton-Harmon station at 4:56 a.m., almost a full hour before sunrise, but it is not early enough for Ben Hoyer.

Mr. Hoyer, like a fast-growing cohort of commuters, wants to get to Grand Central Terminal even earlier than is now possible. By 6 a.m., Mr. Hoyer said, the demands of his job as the head stock trader for an investment firm have already piled up. He is looking forward to next week when the train will start its run 11 minutes sooner and deposit him in Manhattan at 5:45 a.m.

“Work is fast-paced, and I need every minute I can get,” said Mr. Hoyer, 36, who lives with his wife and two children in Briarcliff Manor, about 30 miles north of the city.

For people like Mr. Hoyer, the limits of the workday have been redefined. Forget 9 to 5, some New Yorkers are pulling 6-to-5 shifts, while others are working 9 to 9. To fit them in, some transit systems that were conceived in a less-flexible era are revamping their service and rewriting their schedules.

In April, the Metro-North Railroad will embark on the biggest addition to its service in 20 years, with the express goal of giving each of its customers the chance to reach Manhattan before 6 a.m. For those burning the candle at the other end, the railroad plans to run more trains back to the suburbs after 7:30 p.m.

And if you thought you were paid poorly, rest assured that the people who have to use these trains are chumps:

With more passengers working through supper, the late-evening trains often resemble chuck wagons, with some passengers balancing whole meals on their knees while others grumble about the smell and the mess.

On the 9:07 p.m. train to New Haven one night last week, Kendra Johnson was huddled over a chicken dinner with a side of pasta salad, a position she finds herself in three nights a week, she said.

“By the time I get home, I am just so exhausted that I don’t want to make anything for dinner, and it is easier to pick things up and eat on the train,” said Ms. Johnson, 27, who lives in Stamford, Conn., and works as an assistant to an executive at a large company in downtown Manhattan.

Judy Klem, an investment banker from Milford, Conn., tries to cram some sleep into her four-hour round trip, which requires setting her alarm for 5 a.m. and leaves her eating dinner at 10 p.m. She resists carrying food onto the trains because she finds the habits of other passengers unappetizing.

“It’s astonishing,” Ms. Klem said. “People get really messy stuff. In the morning, people eat bananas and then drop the peels on the ground, so then the peels are on the train floor like in a cartoon.”

Thanks A Lot, Mom. Jerk.

One of the quirky benefits of growing up in New York City is that parents are forced to accept that their grown children will move back home after college. Until now:

My daughter recently graduated from college and got her first real job. I thought I’d be one of those parents who worried about adjusting to an empty nest.

I wish. My daughter is still living at home.

. . .

Not only is my daughter living with me, so is her dog — an 80-pound Shepherd Akita rescue. She has a boyfriend too, and he’s hanging out here most of the time. Running into the realities of New York real estate, she couldn’t find an affordable apartment to rent in a neighborhood where it was safe for her to go outside, even with her dog.

. . .

I have a great two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a very large terrace, an apartment I was lucky enough to have bought 26 years ago. But these days my two cats, their litter box and I are largely confined to my bedroom. That’s because my daughter’s dog thinks it’s great fun to chase my cats and bark at them.

. . .

It could be worse. My friend Leslie lives in a studio apartment with her son who graduated from college five years ago.

Her devastating conclusion:

To all my pals who decided not to have children and who may be questioning that decision, there’s a lot to be said for a nice cat or a dog. They’re never grumpy and they don’t borrow your clothes.

The Melting Pot, In A Vial

The Post’s Lindsay Powers investigates local sperm bank options and sees New York itself:

But I scroll on to more local options, including No. 356 from the Sperm Bank of New York Inc. An 18-page description ($12) and a baby picture (also $12) reveal an Italian-Irish man who works in public relations, is a vegetarian and never gets upset when he has to wait in line. He looks quite dapper as a kid, in a gingham bow tie and straw-colored hair.

But what about the guy with the Ivy League degree on Idant Laboratories’ Web site? He’s a Jew of Russian heritage who studied at a prestigious Midwestern university.

JACKPOT! He went to Dalton, the super-exclusive Upper East Side high school. But could I use that to get our kid in?

Intrigued, I click to spend an extra $8 and view a handwritten 10-page profile, where I learn that this guy — a lab technician calls him “a really rich and good-looking lawyer” — has self-described “excellent, thick” hair.

But let’s be honest. I’m a blonde. And women want their kids to resemble them a bit.

“You won’t have a 5-foot-2 Chinese woman saying to us, ‘I want a blond, tall donor,'” said Rodgaard.

My eyes drift over to an Italian-German-Hungarian, at the Park Avenue Fertility Group, who loves Chinese and Italian food and does laundry in his spare time.

“We used to only sell lumberjack types from Minnesota,” said Joanne, the office manager there. “But we started using local samples to appeal to a more Upper East Side, Jewish and WASPy clientele.”

You Might Be Asking Yourself, “Where Do People Go Skiing In July?”

Who exactly are the “snowmen” looking for “ski bunnies” on Craig’s List? They’re your neighbor, for example:

This neighbor of mine, all he does is get high and get laid. He doesn’t work; he doesn’t go to school. He doesn’t go to the gym, to the supermarket, or even leave his house really, except maybe to go to a bar nearby. But for all that being in his house, he only sleeps maybe every three days, only when his body gives out from all the cocaine and cigarettes and sex.

An uncle died and left him a small pot of money. Nothing extravagant, but enough. Instead of investing it, saving it, or buying a three-bedroom in Harlem, he keeps a steady supply of liquor, weed and coke delivered to his apartment, where he sits around playing Xbox and picking up women on Craigslist.

If his postings sound familiar — “Snowman looking for a ski bunny,” for example — that’s part of the trick. “It’s scientific,” he says. “You want to be a newbie, keep it strictly platonic. I had to school myself.” That sets the women at ease, he says, and never gives them a reason to think twice. There is never, ever any mention of sex. They come over for some free coke and a half-sane, harmless good time with a well-mannered Jewish boy. “Once I get them here,” he says, sprawled out half-naked on his unmade bed, “then I mack them.”

. . .

The nice neighborhood in Manhattan is important, he says, to establish his bona fides. His place even has a mezuzah on the front door. But inside, bags of garbage and a week’s worth of unread newspapers pile up inside the door. Improvised ashtrays, empty Marlboro Red packs and empty cognac bottles cover every flat surface. Judging from his coffee table, his breakfast was delivery french fries.

The Game Is Stacked

The Village Voice reports that New York women are wising up to the strategies outlined in Neil Strauss’ The Game:

“It was Saturday night, we had just had sex,” recalls Caitlin, a 22-year-old private tutor living on the Upper West Side. “I went into the bathroom. He had, of course, stacks of The New Yorker and some other random books. Underneath the New Yorkers, I saw what I thought was the Bible. And the first thing I thought was, ‘Oh my God, he has the Bible in the bathroom.’ But it was The Game, the picking-up-girls book. So I flipped through it a little bit.”Five minutes in, Caitlin felt like she was reading a script of her night so far: Apparently, she’d been negged, cubed, kino’d, then f-closed by a PUA. She stormed out the bathroom, book in hand. “He sort of didn’t want to discuss it.”

A neg is a backhanded compliment; the cube is a sleazy “interactive demonstration of value” routine; kino is short for kinesthesia, i.e., physical contact; f-close is sex. That leaves PUA: pickup artist.

. . .

Ask anyone: The nice guy loses; the jerk gets the girl. Since last September, The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (Regan/Harper Collins) has broken down this truism to a foolproof science.

Softbound in black faux leather to resemble the Bible, The Game reveals the field-tested lines and techniques Strauss learned during the year and change he spent interacting with the world’s finest pickup artists, leading “sarging” missions (wherein AFCs, “average frustrated chumps,” practice their moves at bars on unsuspecting women), and eventually living with a few PUAs in a Los Angeles mansion they called Project Hollywood. Clearly explained, the book’s tricks are easy to learn and deploy, and quietly devastating in their success.

Like an oversaturated multi-level marketing system, Players must now adapt to a post-Game world:

At 151, a Lower East Side bar that’s seen The Game manifest itself in all too many ways, from plastic firemen’s hats to amateur hypnosis, I met Steve Lucien, DC, and Vic, three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. for the weekend. Under the pretense of visiting friends on the East Coast, the three really had come into the city because, as Strauss writes at the end of The Game, L.A. is completely sarged out. They want to investigate New York.

With them they brought new methods—they were updating the Game to give old tricks new life. Recently Lucien had been doing something you could call Reverse Game, in which he frames his Game-driven advances as friendly warnings about Game-driven jerks:

“Hey, there’s some weird shit happening in this bar,” Lucien will say. “These guys are just coming up and saying really weird shit to women—something about an eagle? Then they’re mean to you. It’s sick!”

“Oh I know what you’re talking about! That book!”

“Yeah, you won’t believe this stuff. Like watch, pretend I’m one of those dudes who read the book. Do you wanna kiss me?”

Update: As Voice editors explain and the writer himself now admits, key parts of the story — and especially this last excerpt — were fabricated, Jayson Blair-like, which is too bad, because I really, really want to believe it happened.

Writer Sylvester’s confession:

I did not meet Steve Lookner in New York at Bar 151. The trip and my encounter with him, DC, and Vali did not happen as I reported, or at all. The scene was a composite of specific anecdotes shared to me primarily by the two other parties, DC and Vali; Lookner did not share or take part in these anecdotes either. I deeply regret this misinformation, and I apologize to Lookner for his distress, which I certainly never intended.