To the Angry Young Woman Who Needlessly Yelled at Me While Trying to Walk Up the Wrong Side of the Subway Stairs Yesterday:

I imagine you probably had a bad day. I had a rather annoying afternoon myself. I imagine you were probably also in a hurry. I understand that, too. I understand that you are probably so very, very important that you do not think you should have to stay on the right side of the stairway with everybody else.

Maybe you're an organ courier and had to get to the hospital in a very great hurry? But I didn't see you carrying any cooler, and I don't think organ transplant centers rely on the MTA to get hearts, lungs and kidneys about in a rush. So, really, there was no obvious reason you needed to get up the steps as fast as humanly possible.

In fact, you were not going as fast as humanly possible -- you were going up the steps at a normal pace -- essentially the same pace as everyone else climbing the stairs. Except they were doing so on the RIGHT side of the stairs. And you, Oh Angry One, could not possibly walk on the right side, even though it would have gotten you out of the subway in just about the same amount of time without interfering with those wishing to go down to the platform. No, no, no: you are so special that you have to walk up on the left.

Look, I understand that sometimes there are times when maybe it's acceptable for the people heading upstairs to fill the entire staircase. For example, I know that exiting at the 33rd street station on in the morning can be really, really annoying, especially since one of the staircases apparently disintegrated or imploded or did whatever it is a staircase might do that would render it unusable for a few weeks until the MTA has repaired it. There are always herds of people trying to make their way through the woefully inadequate upright turnstiles (whatever those cage-like whirlabout things are called) and usually, an alarm is sounding because some resourceful person has opened the emergency door, allowing more people to stream through at once. It's chaotic and totally annoying and there are maybe 200 people trying to fit up the narrow staircase at once. Then, I kind of think it's OK if people walk on the right and left simultaneously, because even then, it takes quite a while for everyone to get out of there and I have to imagine it's a bit of a fire hazard. Those few straggling passengers trying to get down the stairs would really be much better served to walk half a block north and enter via the considerably more ample entrance at 33rd street.

But yesterday afternoon as you exited the 6 train, there were not hundreds of people trying to get up those steps with you. There were maybe half a dozen. And ALL of them, except for you, stuck to the right side of the staircase. Because they are considerate.

What I am getting at is that you did not have to yell at me. You did not have to shout "I'm trying to get up the stairs, get out of my way!" And when I helpfully replied "Well, usually in this country, we go on the right side--" you did not need to cut me off and say "No! No "usually"! You should learn to be considerate!"

Because, really, I think your actions demonstrate just who needs to learn her manners.

I wanted to say a lot more to you on this subject (also on other subjects, such as how people can't just decide to drive on the left because they think the other cars on the road should be more "considerate", and also how you are a fat cow) but you walked off rather quickly.

I'm going to assume that my formidable bitchiness scared you off; that the 5'4" white girl in the pink coat was really too intimidating to behold. Also, I'm going to assume you realized you were wrong, and scuttled off in shame.

That's OK. Realizing you are wrong is part of the learning process. But don't get in my way again, bitch.

Love,
Caroline

Sacrifices

For Lent this year, I gave up celebrity gossip. (When I tell people this, I'm met with an almost universal, "Wow, that's a good one!") It's not that I think it's the greatest evil facing our society today, or that I think I had an out-of-hand obsession. But there was some part of me that was really bugged by the fact that we all spend a great deal of time thinking and talking about people we've never met, and whose lives don't actually have any particular meaning for our own futures.

Now, I should stop and clarify what this Lenten sacrifice has involved: basically, I've made a conscious effort to avoid pursuing it (i.e., no Us Weekly, no browsing Page Six while sipping coffee at my desk, and no E! Entertainment Network -- although I did let myself watch some bits of red carpet coverage. That's fashion, not gossip, right?) and when I am unavoidably presented with it (like when I'm at the gym and CNN has decided to devote their 24-news network to non-stop Anna Nicole coverage and I can't help but see the TVs as I walk by, or when the Daily News splashes a big ole' picture of Britney flipping out on their cover) I can't engage in it. "Move on!" I must tell myself. "Nothing to see here!"

I haven't been terribly successful in avoiding it -- partly because our culture has a very hard time divorcing fake news about famous people from actual news about world events -- and partly because I am human. But I have done a pretty good job of avoiding my usual gossip blogs, which is triumph of sorts.

But the thing is, now that I've taken these time-killers out of my life, I am not sure what I am supposed to do to kill time. For a while, I started looking up random names that I could remember from elementary and high school. Which was mildly interesting: I learned that one of my best friends from third grade has invented some sort of "Post-it note organizer" for some kind of office supply invention competition, and also found that quite a few of my old playmates are now engaged or married. (This should not surprise me, I suppose, but it almost makes me want to be like, 'Well, I'm not getting married for years! I'll be too busy being fabulous!' just to be contrary. Not because I have specific plans to be fabulous that preclude marriage, or that one can't be fabulous and married simultaneously; but, you know, whatever. Anyway: they made me feel like I should fight against this force that compels people in their mid-to-late 20s to pair off and throw down an entire year's salary on a one-day party at a country club. Even if some of them did appear quite happy on their MySpace pages.)

But even with all the wedding pictures, office supply invention competitions and other random trivia about my old acquaintances that the Internets have revealed, obessing about the lives of people who are a basically strangers to me now to kill time because I'm not supposed to be obsessing about the lives famous strangers... seemed a little bit wrong. (Ok, "obsessing" might be a little strong: Googling someone hardly counts as a full-on fixation, but you get the idea.) I know some of its just human nature -- we're probably, like, programmed by evolution to seek out information about people we've never met and then make catty comments about how bad they look (I'm sure science will support me on this notion) -- but I'd like to try and rise above it. At least until Easter, which is still more than two weeks away. So, in the mean time, dear readers, this site might actually get a little extra attention from me.

Trains, planes, etc.

This past Friday night, I went home to visit my family in Massachusetts. (By the way, I'm rather overly proud of myself for having spelt "Massachusetts" right on my very first try just now -- despite having lived most of my life there, it's on the list of words I have trouble remembering properly. Other words on this list include "maintenance", "convenience" and I just recently was able to remove "restaurant.")

It was the second trip in a row that required someone to cross state lines to retrieve me from Rhode Island.

The last time, it was the day before Christmas Eve, which, it turns out, is a rather popular time to fly. Having only booked our tickets a week or two in advance, Delta chuckled to itself and said "Hah, suckers. They paid for a full-price, regular fare ticket, but this plane is overbooked. We'll mark them as 'Standby' in our computers, but only notify ourselves. We'll also make sure to be extra crabby that day."

The way the twisted world works, we were somehow happy to have been able to get spots on a 4 pm flight to Providence, even though we'd originally been scheduled for, like, a 10 am to Boston. It sucked. But happily, my mom was willing to drive down to T.F. Green and pick up her daughter and her daughter's boyfriend, who, by the way, is the one who said "I think we should fly."

This most recent occasion, it was Amtrak's fault. Or, actually, it was not Amtrak per se, but some faulty power situation at South Station which prevented all trains from actually getting there. Our conductor sighed and said, "Well, um, they're going to see if they can re-route us to Ruggles, but uh," he paused, "Well, you can tell your family members you're in Providence, it's uh, near the State House, and, um, there are probably signs. From 95. I think. You might want to tell them that. If they can come."

We were told we could stay put and see if they could manage to get us on the schedule to get into Ruggles. "But I don't want to make any, you know, promises," the conductor warned.

Fortunately, I have a sister and brother-in-law with a great deal of patience and, also, four wheel drive. So I didn't get to find out what the hell one does when deposited in the Back Bay sometime around 1 am in a city that apparently finds it quaint to stop running at midnight. (Also, a city that has recently adopted the most irritating swipe card system I've ever seen. Instead of saying something obvious, like 'A single ride is $2.00, and if you buy a lot, it's $1.70 per ride' they have a really confusing chart comparing CharlieCard and CharlieTicket rates. They don't actually explain what is so different about these things. Also, their machines were apparently unable to read any of my credit cards, for reasons the machines and station attendants could not explain to me. But I guess you can't expect much from a place that confused Lite-Brites with bombs.)

In the last six and a half years, I've done a lot of traveling across the Northeast. Trains (some Septa/NJ Transit ordeals, a lot of Amtrak), planes (AirTrain, United, Delta), and automobiles (Greyhound, Fung Wah, and the occasional trip in a rental car or my mom's station wagon). And I've concluded that this is a really annoying part of the country to traverse. Going a mere 200 miles will take hours, and that's only if it goes smoothly. If it doesn't, it will take lots and lots of hours.

Generally, I prefer to be driven by family or companion, but that happens most rarely, seeing as how I don't know many people in New York with cars, and family drives are basically for major moving ordeals.

After that, I find that the train is actually best -- it costs about the same as most plane trips, but my mother is a lot more likely to come pick me up at Rte. 128 than she is to make the trek to Logan. And Penn Station is considerably easier to get to than any of the NYC airports (unless it's LaGuardia and I'm leaving from my house, in which case, hurrah.) And Amtrak, for all their irritating qualities and tendencies to break down (I've spent hour on stalled trains, waiting for stalled trains to be cleared, waiting for new engines to arrive, etc.), doesn't overbook. (Anymore; it used to be that you could end up spending a good leg of your journey sitting in the aisle, but they stopped doing the Unreserved trains in the Northeast a few years ago.) Also, their pricing system, while not cheap, is at least pretty transparent.

Buses, while the cheapest option, are also the most uncomfortable, and the ones that most make me feel like I really am getting too old for this crap. Sadly, while I may be too old to pile in with eager college students and the unwashed just-released-from-prison masses, I am not yet too rich. So. I took the bus home yesterday.

Sad moment

I am a very light sleeper. Which is usually not a bad thing; if an intruder should try and invade my apartment in the middle of the night, I would quickly be prepared to... witness my demise? And I pretty much never oversleep. Most days, in fact, I usually wake up before my alarm clock.
That was the case this morning. I was still super-sleepy when I woke up, but the earplugs I've decided to wear as a guard against someone's occassional snoring problem were starting to bug me, so I took them out. Then I heard noises that suggested, actually, life might be better if the earplugs were back in my ears. But at that point, I decided it was too late, might as well just get up and shower because my alarm would be going off in a few minutes anyway.

So, I shower. And then I sit at the computer to check the weather, email, headlines, etc. It's usually something I try and skip in the mornings because either I have no interesting email and the headlines or boring (and really, it's not so hard to guess what the weather will be like today: it's going to be cold outside but about 85 in my office, so, inevitably, my wardrobe choices will lead to discomfort at some point) or there is interesting email and headlines and I'm suddenly 15 minutes behind schedule. Anyway. Only a moment ago did I glance down at the clock and see it change to 7 am. Did Daylight Savings go into affect today? No, that makes no sense. That's a weekend thing. And then I realize, oh crap, it says 7 am because it is 7 am. I was so tired that, when I woke up and glanced at the clock, my tired eyes read 6:30 as 7:30 and decided it was time to get up.

It was, in fact, time to roll over and sleep for another hour and 15 minutes. Argh.

Update: Decided to go back to bed, nap for 45 minutes with towel on my head. Was moderately successful, but was still way tired when 8 am rolled around. Got coffee on way to office, possible mistake as it's made me super-wired and yet, somehow, still tired. I say it everyday, but it bears repeating: it's hard to be me.