4 posts tagged “train”
Black guy with long braids and shades gets on the Metrorail Green Line train to Greenbelt yesterday at around 3:30. Appears to have a need to show off to the entire car full of passengers, his voice at a feverish pitch, quick and sharp, staccato, cutting through my reverie and my futile attempts to enjoy a leisurely read through my current book.
"Who needs a wife? Fuck a wife! I'm a bachelor for life! I'm a bachelor for life! (10 times over until I thought he'd never stop)."
Okay, okay, we get the point, I think.
And then, "I'm the reason you threw away our dildo..."
I wondered if this string of rhyme was a creation of his own or a song he had piping through the headphones.
I guess he tired of ranting or got off the train.
There was a sudden lightening of the mood.
When he was there, it was like everything else around me stopped as people shifted uncomfortably, sat out the interminable end of his tirade or glanced knowingly at one another, most of them annoyed and wanting silence or space for conversation.
I have nothing against rap or hip-hop. I used to listen to groups like Naughty By Nature all the time, over a decade ago before my musical tastes hit one of many areas of metamorphosis in my life. I'm not even offended by curse words, hardly notice them. Heck, I say them myself, a bit more than I should. But what seemed to bother me was that his voice, the vibrations, this negativity in the air, was almost palpable, as if it took charge of the air around me, the space in which I enjoyed a brief respite. His vocality took that away from me, shook me to the core.
I'm all for freedom of speech and diversity, but when you are squeezed together and having to coexist with others in a speeding tin can, an onslaught of words such as this seems to be suffocating, and the situation calls for some understanding of noise pollution.
Of course, I know it also calls for me, the newcomer, to develop more of that thick urbanite skin, that ability to shrug off what's antagonistic and be more aloof, unconcerned and just accept the way of my new life.
One person's art is another person's villainous verbosity.
Jen
Here's my worst pet peeve of the day: Establishments where you place your order and wait in line for a while, only to be greeted with a blank look when you present your credit/bank card and are told they do not accept them. Hence, they wasted your time, and you wasted their time, ingredients and resources, AND the time of the people behind you -- all because they could not be bothered to place a single sign nearby to tell people it's cash only. People, it's becoming a virtual world. I don't believe the majority of us even carry cash on a regular basis.
I detest cash only places - have no patience for that, especially in a place like Arlington, Virginia, where I work in the D.C. Metro area for god's sake. This happened to me this morning, and I looked at the lady, incredulous, and replied, "Oh, well, forget it" and walked off. What was I going to do? I was on a 15-minute break, and it wasn't like I could magically produce a wad of cash from the palm of my hand in place of the card.
I'm sure this would not have been such a big deal to me had I not had my day begin badly in the first place, with me slipping on ice and tumbling roughly down the concrete stairs of the townhouse where I live, bruising and skinning my knees and probably waking up half the neighborhood, as the unexpectedness of loosing my footing immediately jarred me. I lay there feeling dejected and frustrated for about five minutes and began to cry uncontrollably, because this was just the sort of thing I didn't need when I was already racing against the clock. Then, to top things off, my wet hair had frozen into a big stick Bride-of-Frankensteinish mess on my head, and once I righted myself and dusted the wet snow off of my clothing and school books, I had to brush hard to make it decent. There was no time for anything else.
This commuting thing is starting to slowly unravel me. When it began, I was new to the area and didn't know anyone, didn't have anything going on, no college classes yet. I used to get to work a half hour early and feel I had time to breathe when the commute was new and novel.
Now I'm getting to work on time, but at the cost of having to leave the house with my hair still wet, not having anything to eat or drink before I do so, and anxiously speed-walking my way from house to car and from car to Metrorail train station, my heart pounding in my chest. I realize that I'm wasting three hours daily on this commute, and I'm harboring some major anger regarding everything to do with this hectic schedule of mine. I'm so worn down in the evenings that I am irritated when anyone calls me after 10 p.m. I won't even answer the phone if they do. To top things off, once I moved downstairs to the basement apartment from the top-floor room I was in (I rent with roommates), my Verizon signal started becoming choppy. Now, not only do I deal with late-night phone calls, but if I answer, I only get a half-garbled message, and that irritates me even more.
Had I not had only a week or so to get out here for this job, I would have certainly found a better place to live. But, things as they were, I had to turn to Craigslist to save my ass, and that's how I came to be in the boonies of suburbia Maryland.
But being locked into a yearlong lease (since it was the only option I could find upon first moving here on 10 days' notice), there is nothing I can do for nine more months.
A studio in a neighborhood across from where I work runs about twice what I'm paying now, and I could afford to live there and deal okay with even such a small space, but my fear is that I'll lock myself into a cycle of renting at that high rate, and then never be able to save up for and afford a home of my own. I'm a contractor, so there is no guarantee that my job and current pay rate will hold forever, and I'm not ready to take such a risk of moving into a place only to discover I don't have the same level of job a year later.
Anyway, a pretty mess I've gotten myself into, it seems.
Any suggestions? Should I move into a room for rent near where I work and end up paying rent in two places? I don't think that would be a wise decision. Should I move into the expensive place when my lease is up and take my chances? What are the rules for subletting here? And is it a hassle or easy to do? I'd love to hear from anyone living in an urban area who has been in the same predicament. It would be an amazing upgrade in my life if I could live in this place and walk to work, begin to have a life and not feel I was chained to this constantly moving rope that keeps slipping from my grasp.
I've tried different methods to try to get to sleep earlier, but I get home around 7 p.m., and once I do that, I have to eat, study and run errands. And forget working out or having a social life - there is no time for that.
Bleep -- bleep -- bleep!
The sounds of a video game in full swing cut through the background sounds of the morning commute from inside a Metrorail train car. I turn my head to see the kid glued to it and muse how the thoughtful touch of a button to considerately turn down or mute the volume is the furthest thing from his hard-wired brain. He is oblivious to anything but the digital connection he has to this machine.
Behind me, a man mumbles something about it to the neighbor in his seat, to the effect of not having had gadgets like that when he was a kid. The man beside him pipes up and agrees. They exchange ages in relation to this, and they spiral backward into a reverie about "party lines." Not the kind of party lines you'd expect to hear as a topic of conversation between two men in the District, I think, smiling, as I eavesdrop surreptitiously on this odd bit of conversation.
The two, who were strangers (as far as I can tell) before this incessant noise brought them to a common ground, reminisce about a time that this type of telephone system connected people within local areas, using different rings to designate calls for each separate household. We modern types who hardly pee without having a cell phone clipped to our belts -- and the few of us who even dare to navigate traffic while simultaneously texting from these mega-multi-function phones (not that I'll admit to anything) -- would have a hard time contending with this archaic system, I think. It is only effective if one party is not constantly tying up the line to the disadvantage of other users. That was during a time when people did not live and die by the phone and the constant availability of communications. Things were not so global, I guess, so they had only to walk down the street to gossip with a friend.
It's hard to fathom now that Alexander Graham Bell once had quite a few doubters as to the eventual success of his invention. Oh, if he could see us now racing about like scurrying rats, data fed to us from every possible source, virtually controlled by this flow of information at times, our world shaped on so many levels by advertising and the news media. I mean do we really ever know what we really think and feel about anything anymore? Can we honestly, 100 percent say that what we speak of and support comes from our own volition and not because of the programming we receive from hearing something over and over on television?
So moments like this morning's idle chat between two commuters are the ones I treasure - the rarity of a human conversation erupting in such an unexpected time and place as during the hubbub of the public transit commute, when an unspoken code seems to dissuade talking.
So call me nosy, because I am.
These moments, no matter how abbreviated, as a whole, over time, give me better insight into this urban culture. I liken myself to a sociologist of sorts, a spectator who is entertained by being a fly on the wall and trying to gain insight into the lives of others. I hope this will help me to develop my craft as a writer. No subject is more interesting to me than people, the stories of our lives, and why we behave the way we do. This world, our society, is a vast frontier that will never be fully and completely explored and will always invite my curiosity.
That's where the meaning of life is to be found. Not in looking down from the ivory tower of corporate offices or pushing people out of the way to get to the top, but in the simple in-betweens -- moments such as this when commonalities arise and spark words between two unaffiliated people; stooping down to pick up something someone dropped, catching up to him and getting a smile in return.
Nah, you would never guess that I'm an idealist, would you? Not in a million years.
Here's a Wikipedia article on party lines, for more info.
