From one, very strange perspective, tonight's series of mishaps and events were all part of a larger plan, namely to make a cute-but-ill tiny asian gal from a horrible experience.

Details:

• I decided to go to the waterfront to see Borat.
• I left around 19:50, but thanks to the bus needing to pick up/drop off a crippled fellow, I arrived at the waterfront around 20:45, too late for the 20:30 showing.
• I popped in to buy tickets for the 9:30 showing, and found that that session and all the rest until the 23:45 showing are sold out, so I bought tickets for that.
• I hung out at the bookstore, reading parts of a novelisation of "Crisis on Infinite Earths" (surprisingly amusing, despite my general disinterest in that genre), paging through a new Gaiman collection a bit (looked to be a mixed bag), and buying Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We", which several friends recommended to me. The bookstore closed at 23:00, so I sat down at a cafe table in the theatre and waited
• Around 23:30, I started to mosey towards the particular room in the theatre, and was amazed to see (and follow) a huge line that went around a corner and almost out of the theatre.
• Borat was amazingly funny, but it had some humour I felt a bit queasy about (the "running of the jew" akin to people running from bulls) and some visual elements near the end that also grossed me out a bit (fat people can be wonderful to be around if they're cool people, although the body type does put me off a bit -- seeing fat people mostly or completely naked puts me off much, much more). It was a film worth seeing despite these things.
• After Borat, I waited at a bus stop for about half an hour before a security person told me the Waterfront isn't on the bus line after a certain hour, after which I hiked into Homestead proper, just missing (as in, I saw it less than a block away) the last bus heading from that area.
• Ignoring the vulture taxis all over, I tried to walk the bridge back to SqHill, but it was closed to pedestrians due to all the construction.
• I instead took, after thinking a bit about the propriety, a Pitt shuttle that was being loaded with students nearby. The driver, thankfully, let me on. Pitt shuttles have music, don't have such bright lights, and apparently cover much more of the city than CMU's shuttles. According to some random overheard conversation, any pitt student can place up to 20 "save me" phone calls over their time as a student, upon which a bus will be dispatched to wherever they are to pick them (and any other needy Pitt folk nearby) up and take them someplace in the normal bus range. That's pretty neat. Sitting with the Pitt students reminded me a bit of the Ohio State atmosphere - Pitt students are very different than CMU students - CMU honestly feels a bit more at home to me than OSU ever did. It was kind of fun singing along to some 80s/early 90s songs that came on the radio.
• Dropped off near the museums, I walked to CMU and hopped on the CMU shuttle
• On the back loop, the shuttle picked up the party that included the drunk/ill chinese girl. After awhile, she gave indications (to the world) that she'd need a bag. I emptied out the bag from the bookstore and handed it to her.
• They got off, and later I got off and made it home.