So You Want to Be a Subway Rider?

Occasionally in the subway, a phenomenon called the "ghost car" occurs - a car that pulls in front of you on the platform will not open its doors. It's fluorescent lighting is off. It's completely empty, with no discernible marks of disrepair. One can only guess at what caused this condition. Perhaps it was because some poor soul vomited after drinking too much Starbucks. Or maybe it was because that particular car's last load of people all collectively had gas. A couple of years ago, there was a news story about a crazy woman who gave birth on the subway, her placenta falling out onto the grooved flooring, sloshing all the way to the back of the car as the train decelerated. The possibilities for why ghost cars exist are endless. But it means that everyone standing on the platform has to board at different parts of the train.

When I found myself facing a ghost car this morning, forced to enter at the next car over, it was like stepping into an alternate universe. Whereas my morning commute is usually full of people quietly reading the Metro, this car was jumping with conversation. At the next stop, a gaggle of sporty 20-somethings hopped on and blocked the doors, looking for all purposes like they'd never ridden the subway before.

After blanking out for a few minutes, staring at an ad in Korean advocating for the vaccination of young children, I noticed that the members of the LL Bean All-Stars were each carrying Vineyard Fellowship messenger bags, which explained why they all looked like they were going on a hike at 9am on a Thursday; everyone was unemployed and had sought out religion to quell their destitute loneliness. For some reason I couldn't summon Grace Olivia Donovan, who usually moderates my desire to provoke religious types, so I spent the rest of the ride giving them the evil eye, hoping that I could burn the sin back into their souls.

Needless to say, I wasn't in a very chipper mood when I attempted to depart at my destination. As I tried to get off, I realized that this shaved-headed yuppie chap was blocking the doors with not one, but two huge duffel bags. Now what jackass gets on the subway and stands in front of the doors with difficult to move luggage? Apparently Shaved-Head Yuppie Man. Like, dude, couldn't you figure out that people would eventually need to leave the train on that side? Even if you had never even seen the inside of a subway car before, couldn't you have surmised that there were doors on both sides of the train for a reason?

When I went to exit, Shaved-Head Yuppie Man just stood there - made no motion to move his shit. I gave him a look that I hope made his singular ball retract back into his body. As people started to push past him, he finally got the message and gestured, albeit slowly, toward transporting his crapola somewhere else. But since the reason why the Yuppie Man's head was shaved was that he recently had a lobotomy, he couldn't figure out what to do with his belongings. So finally I solved the problem for him by straddling all of the bags to get onto the platform while whispering invectives under my breath and growling. As I turned around to give him one last withering stare, I noticed a tear in his eye and his lip quivering. I'm sure the Vineyard Fellowship LL-Bean All-Stars came to the rescue and lulled him back into oblivion by reading passages from the bibles they all had tucked into their pants (where the Lord works his magic as a makeshift chastity belt cod-piece).

Bon Voyage, Shaved-Head Yuppie Man. Bon Voyage.

Song of E

Today after I got home from work, I headed out to jiggle vegetables and sniff freshly baked breads at the local farmers market. To this end, I took a short cut through a courtyard off my neighborhood's main drag. As I dodged dogs desperate to nip at my ankles, and glided past the usual crowd of drunken homeless men eager to swallow my loose change, I heard a voice echoing off the walls of the surrounding buildings.

At first it sounded like a recording. But as neared the courtyard's gated exit, I realized that it was just some hipster kid seemingly crooning along to the music he was listening to on his headphones. Yet when I began to process things, I realized that he wasn't even humming, he was just repeatedly singing the letter "E" for various lengths of time, each in a differing tones, none remaining consistent in volume.

It puzzled me greatly why anyone would stand around singing the letter "E" over and over again until I got home and tried it for myself. I have to say, there is some satisfaction to be derived from doing this, but I found the execution to be most rewarding while lying on one's back on the cool, hard kitchen floor.

Hot to Twat

I stayed home sick today with a low grade fever and some minor sinus problems. This illness, I suspect, is a part of a general malaise that has befallen me lately. I just haven't been very motivated. I've not been able to get my ass the gym, read any books, or even commit to watching any TV show for longer than fifteen minutes. I feel like I've fallen into a vortex of boredom, which is fine for mid-winter doldrums, but there's no excuse for feeling like this in beautiful, sunny, August.

I spent the day in bed, alternately reading and having fevered dreams that my eyebrows were growing uncontrollably furrier by the minute. Late in the afternoon, I got a call from my good friend Ruth.

Ruth recently did all the things we're supposed to achieve in adulthood - she bought a house, got married, and got a promotion - all within the span of a month. Three weeks ago, she and her husband moved an hour and a half away to the country. This means that she no longer shows up at my doorstep every other night with a bottle of beer for me and some ginger ale for her, declaring that I am to entertain her while Dan plays Australian rules football with the boys.

When I first met Ruth, I don't think either of us would have ever expected that we would eventually become such good friends. Ruth and Dan lived upstairs from my best friend and her girlfriend, and for a while, were their flavor of the month. The stories that Katie and Leslie told me about Ruth painted her as a mildly schizophrenic, foul-mouthed Martha Stewart (which, by the way, isn't a completely inacurate assesment). The two couples declared Wednesday nights game night, and Katie and Leslie invited me along for good measure. I was told to brace myself because Ruth was, "quite the character" according to Leslie, who pronounced this like she was insinuating that Ruth had a minor case of Tourettes.

Ruth and I have since made our first impressions of each other the stuff of friendship legend. That night, when the five of us sat down to play Scrabble, Ruth played, and argued her way into double word score for "hottotwat." The conversation, at first, was dizzying. Since the four of them had already established a rapport, I was the odd girl out. In such circumstances, I tend to shrink back into myself and observe my surroundings before making any sudden, irredeemable moves. Because of this, Ruth later told me she thought I was, in her words, "a fucking potato, what a freakin' vanilla!" and she almost, but not quite, snapped shut her mental file on me.

I, on the other hand, missed some detour in the conversation, and wound up with the impression that Ruth had served time in prison for dealing crack. I guess the way I felt about this "revelation" was the same sort of thing sheltered, semi-liberal straight people feel about meeting their first gay. The thoughts that shot through my head went along the track of, "Wow, an ex-con? She seems like she reformed well. In fact, she appears to be pretty nice. Can you be friends with an ex-crack dealer, someone who spent time in the big house? Can you have an open mind about this? And why didn't Katie and Leslie give me a heads up that Ruth spent time in jail? They clearly don't seem surprised about this, so they must have known. Is this the sort of thing you don't bring up out of politeness? Is this what Leslie meant by calling her "a character"? And I wonder if she had any bitches? Cause she clearly was nobody's bitch."

Later, after leaving Ruth and Dan's apartment, because the issue was never exactly cleared up, I asked Katie and Leslie about Ruth's incarceration, which elicited rolling-on-the-floor laughter and promises to tell Ruth about my gross misapprehension. I subsequently got her back when I had her convinced I was a covert religious fundamentalist by accidentally getting my groove on to a god rock band at a local indie-music fest. Ruth's panic subsided only when she realized that I couldn't hear a thing they were singing. But the image of my having an alter-ego, whom she calls Grace Olivia Donovan, praising Jesus with a love for Creed and Jars of Clay, has left a lasting impression.

It's been two years now, and initial mistaken judgments of each others' characters notwithstanding, we get on like gangbusters. So when Ruth called, I chucked aside my instincts to plead sick and agreed to get dinner with her after I realized that I hadn't seen her in several weeks.

We found ourselves at the only decent, semi-authentic, Mexican restaurant in New England. I droned on about bearing witness to the rapidly devolving state of Katie and Leslie's dyke-dramatastic relationship. She told me about de-gayifying her work protégé, a straight black man who had the misfortune of adapting a little bit too well to the flamboyant culture of his native south Florida. When I got up to go to the bathroom and nearly planted my face in our approaching waiter's crotch, she whispered to me, "I don't quite think that was the kind of tip he was looking for." If not to make comments like this, what the hell else is the purpose of having friends, I ask you?

On the way home, after proclaiming a need to hit the road and get back to her husband, Ruth took what was essentially a straight shot back to my house and turned it into a thirty-minute adventure. Instead of just dropping me off, we pulled into the liquor store to get some regular and ginger beer. When we got back to my apartment, we took up our usual places - me on the loveseat, she on the futon couch - and I don't think we really talked about much. As I sat sipping my overly hoppy Smuttynose, I realized that I had forgotten all about the phlegm dripping down the back of my throat and the pressure building in my sinuses. For the first time in the past couple of weeks, I felt like me again.