1. Low on Gas. My low fuel light went on during last night’s commute home, right about the time I was getting off the highway, but since the traffic has been gods-awful this whole week I just ignored it and drove straight through to daycare, picked up the little guy, and headed home. I had a vague notion at the time that I would wake up five minutes early today and leave the house five minutes early to accommodate the need for gas, but the (allegedly) somnolent nocturnal hours turned out to be pretty rough last night. The little guy woke up a few different times and was unable to console himself back to dreamland, and various cold symptoms interrupted my sleep at other times, so the alarm came far too soon and I was moving in slo-mo thereafter anyway. So I didn’t leave early, and still had to stop for gas, and thus by the time I finally got on the highway it was totally cloggerated. My only consolation is that it’s been just as heinous the two previous mornings when I did hit 66 more or less on time, so, who knows.
2. An Earful of Judgment in the Parking Lot. Anyway, by the time I got to the Metro lot it was a bit more crowded than usual, but I did manage to find a space. I quickly realized that the space was probably standing empty because immediately to its right was a giant black SUV with its driver side wheels slightly over the white line. I was able to slip my modest and compact vehicle into the space anyway, and leave myself enough room to get out as well, but in doing so I only left about three inches between my passenger side and the SUV’s driver side. Beyond argument, I rendered it impossible for the SUV’s owner to get in on the driver’s side. And the fact is (I’m not proud of this, but I’m not exactly mortified, either) that doing so gave me some grim satisfaction. I’ve ranted it before and I’ll rant it again, SUVs are bad for the environment, bad for our national addiction to fossil fuels, unsafe to share the road with, sometimes unsafe to drive period, and just generally not cool. Some people have vaguely plausible reasons for owning a personal vehicle that can go offroad and carry large amounts of cargo. These people are farmers and general contractors who use the vehicles in their line of work, but if you are parking your giant SUV in a commuter lot then you clearly are not using the vehicle for work, whatever it is that you do, so you are utterly unjustifiably selfish. And if you pile on the selfishness by not even bothering to park your absurd behemoth properly between the lines of the space, you get less than zero sympathy from me for anything untoward that might happen as a direct result. (Of course I have that whole hard-ass line of thinking but the truth is, because I leave work on the early side to go pick up my son from daycare, I will very likely move my car and unblock the SUV’s door before its owner ever gets back and even notices, and I know it.)
As I was walking away from my car, a woman was walking past and looked at the configuration of vehicles behind me and said “That’s close!” and I agreed that yes it was and she said, very accusatorily, “How they supposed to get in their car you didn’t leave them no room to open the door?” Which honestly flabbergasted me, but I kept my composure (this is an advantage to being an overthinker who composes monologues of rationalization on an ongoing basis) and I pointed out to her, “He has a giant SUV and he parked it over the line, you know?” She just shook her head and said “You better hope you don’t get back and find a big old dent in your car door,” like the SUV owner would be fully justified smashing their door open into mine rather than, say, climbing in on the passenger side or whatever. (From a physics standpoint, though, I’m pretty sure the gap between the cars was so small you couldn’t even open the SUV door far enough or fast enough to ding my car, so, ha ha!) I just said “Yeah, we’ll see” and she sneered “No, YOU’LL see,” and with a supreme effort and will I managed not to yell back at her, “That’s right, ma’am, I’LL see because this hasn’t got a goddamn thing to do with YOU so will YOU kindly shut up now?” I just kept walking.
And then the oddest thing happened as the woman called after me “Hey you don’t happen to have a cigarette lighter do you?” And I turned around and said I didn’t (which was true) and smiled and said sorry and then turned back around and kept walking, and that was the end of that. I mean, who does that, berating a perfect stranger for their parking lot etiquette and then figuring that’s the optimal softening up for asking a favor? People are bizarre.
3. A Mysterious Delay. Right, the lady in the parking lot didn’t really slow me down and I hopped on the train waiting at the platform and soon was being trundled city-ward. In between stations, right before the station where I normally get off, the train stopped in a tunnel and held there for a prolonged period. I have no idea why. I believe the conductor was offering some explanation via the intercom system, but the typical sucky maintenance of Metro’s fleet prevailed in rendering those explanations unintelligible. The ambient noise of the various motors and rotors of the train itself drowned out the low-volume, dropping-in-and-out voice of the conductor drifting feebly from the speaker. All told it was only about a ten-minute delay, but …
4. Poor Planning on Reading Material. I spent most of the delay twiddling my thumbs, because right about at the second-to-last stop of my route, I finished the book I had been reading. I had been oblivious to how fast I’d been going through it this week as well as how close I was to the end, so I hadn’t packed a new book to start in on. All I could do was stare into the middle distance of the Metro car, determinedly avoiding eye contact with my fellow commuters, and lamenting the fact that I’ll also have nothing to read on the way home tonight. Unless I go buy something at the drugstore. Or pick up a copy of The Onion. OK, fine, I know it’s not the end of the world but it’s one of those little annoyances I pride myself on usually avoiding.
5. Forgot my Umbrella. By the time we got to my station I was in such a hurry to get off the train that I stood up without grabbing my umbrella off the floor. The cognitive perils of Metro-riding are many, but one is that if you board at an outdoor station, you may need an umbrella while you wait, as was the case this morning, but if you deboard at an underground station, you don’t have the view of the sky to remind you it’s raining and didn’t you have an umbrella around here somewhere? My cluelessness was further compounded by my certainty that it would be harder than usual to get off the train because, given the delays on the line, there would be a ton of people impatient to get on the train at the stop, and I needed to get out of their way with all due haste. Not that my fellow commuters on the train made that very easy. Surprisingly this is a phenomenon which I have only the rarest experience with, but today I happened to find the aisle between me and the train door blocked by people who felt extremely comfortable standing rooted in place like statues. They didn’t even glance around to see if anyone was coming up behind them to get off the train. I had to say “excuse me” fairly loudly, and more than once in rapid succession, as if the dude standing next to the dude I just said excuse me to didn’t realize he was also in my way until I specifically addressed him. Again, people are bizarre. At any rate, the umbrella was kinda old and shabby and it’s not the worst thing in the world to be forced to replace it, but still, when the realization hit me on the escalator it was kind of the argh-cherry on a crap-sundae.
I swear by Valhalla, this is not a punchline, I am taking the PRTC bus tomorrow.
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