On board with my furry friends

I've noticed this new middle-aged lady - let's call her Vick Furry* - that wears an expensive fur coat every morning, complemented by a wonderfully huge fur hat, like the ones worn by Soviets in spy movies. I mean, this thing is incredible. I find myself staring at it and wondering what waiting for the train with an animal on my head would be like. I think I would pretend it were still alive and talk to it. Because really there isn't much else to do but stand around and shiver.

*This is joke for comic book dorks. If you don't get it, you're probably cooler than me.

At any rate, hat or not, she inevitably gets into the train every morning in front of me. She has a buddy waiting for her, and so she stops right inside the door, he gets up to let her in, and I'm left waiting behind the Soviet ice princess and her boy toy. For those of you who have rushed to get into trains at rush hour, you know how precious few seats there are, and waiting behind someone while watching the rest of the car fill in the empty seats ... there just are not words for the frustration. Actually there are: I hate her.

I'm most certainly not a PETA sympathizer, but everything about this woman makes me want to scream. Keeping the line of people behind her waiting for her to de-animalize her entire body; flirting with all the old men around her; talking loudly while the rest of us on the train are reading newspapers or sleeping. Maybe I just need more sleep.

Stop looking at me, you loveless loser

Being the incredible husband that I am, I picked up some flowers for my wife on the way home from the train station yesterday. From the time I left the store until I got home 7 minutes later, people shot me looks. There was the guy in the car who looked at me, his face seeming to say, "What a loser. He bought flowers for someone. I only have to pull up in my awesome sports car and invite a woman to my whites-only country club and I am golden." Then there were the middle-aged women, whose husbands have long since given up on romance. They each shot me a smile as if to say, " If only a hip young man would buy me some purple flowers. My thighs ache with hope." All of this is to say, do not buy flowers and then walk with them for a couple of blocks. Drive.

All the news that's fit to recycle

I've grown accustomed to many aspects of my daily commute - fighting for a seat on the morning train, heavily armed police officers patrolling the subway and train station, women wearing half bottles of perfume, the homeless people in Penn Station - but there are just some things that still mystify me. Some things I never would have imagined growing up in my North Carolina hamlet. Namely, I routinely see grown men, men wearing suits and expensive overcoats, pulling newspapers out of the trashcan to read in Penn Station.

Now, I have nothing against recycling. And I am happy when people dispose of their newspapers rather than toss them on the ground or leave them on the seats of the train.  But are times really so bad that people cannot afford to buy a 50-cent newspaper? Are these investment bankers so hard up that they must rummage through public trash cans to read the latest bad economic news? (I guess in fairness I should say that these people usually take newspapers off the top of the trash heap, a la George eating the eclair from the trash can on Seinfeld. But I think I side with Jerry on this one: on top of the trash is still in the trash.)

So, ye readers, weep for the bankers, the day traders, the suited masses,

For those that so recently lived the modern lives of kings

Are themselves unable to feed their brains nor clothe their asses,

Whist heavens' angels, heavy hearted, beat their wings

Nevermore, nevermore.

A femme point of view

Greetings, transit anecdote enthusiasts. Since Phillip worked from home today, but I, his wife, did make the commute I thought it fitting to spice it up for you. I haven't commuted into the city on consecutive days since the summer of '07, but as of Monday, I'm making the hop four days a week. Here are some of my thoughts.

• Say you are on a relatively crowded train. You are sharing a "booth" with three passengers. One of the passengers takes her leave, leaving a side each to you and your fellow passenger. So, you breathe a little deeper, stretch your legs a little more. Which of the following would you then do?

a) move your things into the free seat next to you
b) stare inappropriately at the young lady across from you
c) rub your tongue over your teeth with your mouth open, making a sucking sound

For a sanity check, option a is perfectly acceptable and I have often taken that step myself. The other options, however, should not be exercised, a fact which the middle-aged man across from me clearly did not understand. It was the teeth sucking that really got to me.

• For those of you who do not partake in public transport on a regular basis, there is an art to maneuvering through a busy transit station. The choreography which keeps the feet a moving and traffic flowing relies on a general agreement of everyone involved to travel at a steady pace, with your eyes directly ahead. This alerts the other pedestrians as to your route, allowing for checks and reactions to avoid collisions. I would just like to state some basic rules that everyone should follow. I'm not asking for much, people.

1) do not read Twilight books while you are walking on a crowded subway platform. You know what, if you're a middle-aged woman, you should not be reading that in public anyway.
2) NEVER stop abruptly in the middle of traffic and turn around. This is ESPECIALLY true if you have luggage, which will be sent a swinging as you aim your moonface expression in the opposite direction.
3) You do not look cooler if you walk with a fake gimp, in the manner of, say, huggie bear. You just look ridiculous.
4) Pick your damn wheely luggage up so that you aren't dragging it behind you and taking people's shins out. My shins are especially offended when, thinking I've found an open spot to careen myself into, they are met with the harsh, off-putting obstacle of a rolling suitcase.
5) Just a general rule for the subway. Always yield to ladies in heels. They need the seat more than you if you're wearing anything but a pair of heels.

I think Phillip would especially agree with that last point. I know he has problems with his stilettos as well. I'm not as funny, but maybe I get points for irascibility?

Yours, eggette

Rats! (or: Welcome back to work!)

Having been out of the state for two weeks, I had a long period of adjustment on my commute this morning. Essentially, I forgot everything that makes the journey from New Jersey to New York so quaint:

• Walking to the train station in the bitter cold as a fierce northern wind blows snot loose in my nose (I apologize; there was no better way to say that)
  
• The mad rush to get inside the train so you can find a seat
  
• Large men sitting with their legs spread far apart, taking up as much of my seat as they feel comfortable doing (spoiler alert: it's a lot)
  
• The conductor who greets me every morning with "Good morning! All tickets display!" providing a sentence I still cannot diagram correctly.
  

And best of all: the rats scurrying along the subway tracks.  This morning I saw a rat that at first did not appear to have a tail. Luckily, I had time to study him and found that he did in fact have a tail. So much the better.

And thus enters 2009. Welcome back!

A finger is a terrible thing to waste

Last week, I made someone on the road so angry with me they almost crashed into the median while violently giving me the finger. It is one of my proudest moments.

On the way home from my last class of 2008, I was driving along the NJ Parkway when someone came zooming up behind me. He stopped just short of my bumper and began flashing his bright lights at me. Now normally I move out of the left lane when I have gotten past the slow-moving car I wanted to pass, but with this numbskull doing his best to make me curse his name, I decided to have some fun. The Parkway at this point has three lanes, so I slowed down to go the exact speed as the car next to me. As the doofus behind me started swerving in and out between the two lanes, I began a maniacal laugh, knowing he could not get around us. After a few seconds of this, he tried to go into the right-most lane, but couldn't get over there either. He came back behind me, flashing his lights again, but I continued to shadow the car in the next lane. He eventually got back in the right lane and passed the car in the middle lane; at this point I sped up and blocked his path into the left lane as he looked desperately for an opening. I laughed a bit more, but by this time I started to grow tired of this - it had been going for over a minute, and it was hard work driving someone this crazy.

So I gave up and let him get in front of me. As he drove by me, he gave me the bird. But this was no ordinary middle finger experience. He had rolled his window down and stuck his hand out the window, pumping his arm back and forth in a most violent way. He continued this as he drove by me, got in my lane in front of me and drove off. As he drove off, his arm violently pumping with that one finger reaching skyward, he failed to notice the slight bend in the road, and his car veered out of the lane and towards the large wall separating the Parkway. He just managed to turn his car - using one arm of course - before ramming into the concrete. And of course, this made me wonder what I would have done had he crashed. Am I morally obligated to help a man who badly injures himself while shouting some of the most vile obscenities available at me? A question for the ages.

On board with a scary loud shouter

I'm now into month six of working in the city, and until today I had never felt scared. Sure, I had had situations that seemed odd, but nothing like what happened on the subway this morning. After the last stop before mine, a large man interrupted the calm commute by shouting at a unknown, horribly scared and quiet anonymous person in the corner of my car. Most of it made sense in that I couldn't make out complete sentences, but I heard phrases like "... you former law student ..." and "... won't get out of MY seat ..." But what scared me was when I heard him say something about "the end" and I noticed that he had a large suitcase.

This was when he started walking to my side of the car. It was funny, later, as I thought about it afterwords, that at this moment, as the large man, unabashedly shouting at something who was not saying anything, walked down the car, the heads of everyone who had been looking at him suddenly and violently shot down, eyes on the floor, like something out of a Rockette's show for the head. This, you might say, is when I really got scared.

As he got closer, he started saying more nonsensical things like "... as the white man says ..." and "... Jesus himself ..." (I don't think he was implying that Jesus was the white man.) But then he said the greatest thing which only added to my fear then (but which, had I heard it 10 years ago, would have been my senior quote in high school): "... talkin' 'bout a check. The next check you get is going to be in Hell. And they don't cash checks there."

You can see how, at the time, I might see these as the last words of a suicide bomber. As soon as I saw the first hint of Spring St, I stood up and walked to the door, crowding the man standing in front of me, eager like never before to get out of the subway.