Train Round the Bend

I have to get one thing out of my system before I start writing this post:

hey guuuuurl!

I found that gif last week and I've been dying to use it. Thank you for indulging me.

So I have been trying to post for awhile; I was knee-deep in one post, but after tweaking it, rewriting certain sections, and just trying to pull it together and make it funnier, I eventually junked it. I sounded obnoxious and whiny, and that's not my intent. See all the things I do for you people? Editing is a bitch. And I half-wrote a couple of other posts I think will survive, but either I think the post will come out better with a little more time, or I'm just not in the mood to finish them. I've got one on credit that really started making my blood boil, and I haven't even cracked the ice on the one I plan to punch out on American health insurance; if you've ever heard me talk about it in person, you know it makes the veins stick out of my neck and makes me look like something out of a cartoon:

Actually, this was just an excuse to look at pictures of Hugh Jackman

hey guuuuuuurl

All of this is my way of saying that despite extended absences, I do have posts in mind and they will eventually be going up. It's a combination of poor scheduling (I don't get home till after 8pm during the week, and actually this is going to factor in to what I'm going to be talking about in a little bit), general laziness (thinking up words and typing them takes a lot of effort!), and also an obsession with lying around watching some combination of TV and movies (I'm currently plowing through Breaking Bad and it's taking all my willpower not to close this window and pick-up where I left off last night) that is the hurdle I keep failing to leap over. But I promise! I'm going to do it today.

One of the things I have always hated are the running totals of how much time you spend each month/year/your-entire-fucking-life doing one activity. You spend approximately one third of your life asleep, several weeks year sitting in front of your computer (hhahaha, who am I kidding, I spend months worth), and I must spend about half of each week going through pictures and videos of corgis. 

This is your brain on corgis

By this count, the 15+ minutes I spend each weekday morning (some times I feel more ambitious than others) on make-up becomes an hour and 15 minutes each week, which is about 5 hours each month... you get the picture. Thus, the 2 hours I spend commuting back and forth from Manhattan every day becomes 10 hours by the end of the week, and essentially an entire unpaid work week by the end of the month. Actually, I am paying to ride the train for those 40 hours; a monthly commuter pass on Metro-North Railroad (the commuter rail that runs from the northern suburbs of New York City) from my station is TWO-HUNDRED SIXTY-SIX DOLLARS and it makes me cry every month when I have to buy a new one. It is truly unbelievable how expensive it is. 

MULDER MAD MULDER SMASH

The breakdown of my commute goes something like this:

From apartment to Hawthorne station: 18 minutes (approximately 1 mile walking)

Hawthorne station to Grand Central Terminal: 40 minutes

Grand Central Terminal to my office: 10 minutes (most of which are spent waiting for the damn elevator)

The trek to-and-from my home station wouldn't be so bad if I didn't live in a suburb that assumes everyone owns a car and is willing to pay ridiculous fees for parking at the station every morning. Seeing as though I do not have a car and never, EVER plan on owning one again (however, I really enjoy seeing other people's hot ass vehicles, and movies that include extended car chases. I don't understand it), I'm stuck walking to the station with no sidewalks. I live off some trafficked roads, so I'm constantly surrounded by cars and for the life of me I will never understand why people HONK AT YOU WHEN YOU'RE WALKING IN THE SHOULDER. Yes, I know you're fucking there; I just have no goddamned choice where to walk. If I could fly, believe me I wouldn't be walking next to giant ass trucks every morning. 

And then there are the catcallers. When I'm going to the station just before 8:00am, it is way, way, way too early to have people hanging out their windows calling out to you. I recently mentioned this problem to a guy friend, and his reaction was "that actually happens?? I thought it was just in movies." No, catcalling does happen and it is truly obnoxious. It is not flattering in the least, and more to the point I don't understand what the hell it's supposed to do. The guys who do it are idiots, but they can't be so stupid as to think I'm going to run to catch-up to them as they're going 40+ down the road and try to throw myself through the window because this is exactly what I've been waiting for my entire life. So actually getting themselves laid can't be their true motive. Does it somehow make themselves feel better about themselves to yell at a stranger? Do they think it's supposed to make me feel better (hint: it doesn't; IT PISSES ME OFF)? It's demeaning, it's offensive, and clearly their mommies didn't hold them enough/held them too much to make them think this is acceptable behavior towards a woman. 

After launching into a diatribe, my friend then asked, "well isn't there some satisfaction in knowing you're attractive?" We are talking about men, and more to it, neanderthals that think yelling out of a window is perfectly fine as public behavior: everything is attractive to them. Turning on idiots like that is up there in difficult with "making my morning coffee," and "replacing the toilet paper roll." I'm not tooting my own horn here; every woman does this every day whether she knows it or not. I'm sure this is why for hundreds of years parents kept their daughters locked up in the house; fathers did it to other women, and mothers had it done to them. The unfortunate fact is that if you're a woman and you step out into society, your body unfortunately becomes public property for ogling, commenting and snarking. It's humiliating in its own way, but a drawback from wanting a little more out of life than standing barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. This is not to say I accept this kind of behavior; most times when I'm catcalled, I either flip them off or yell to go fuck themselves, which I guess is my own way of making myself as unappealing as possible so that I can just be left alone. It may not be the classiest reaction, but I can only take so much before I lash out.

Anyway, moving on. Between dodging cars, running across streets timing the lights and traffic (yeah, no crosswalks anywhere either, even very close to the station), and catcallers, those 18 minutes to the station are an absolute dream. And since New York can't make up its mind as to what season it is, it's still rather warm and definitely humid around here, so I'm generally sweating and my hair has grown to epic proportions. In the morning I don't have to stand on the platform for very long since I've got it timed to get myself to the station only a couple of minutes before the train arrives (every morning I get a little later and a little later... it's like I want to test how late I can go before I actually miss the train).

Most days being on the train isn't a problem. My train turns into an express from White Plains station (about halfway on the line that I ride every day; the local goes up one station past White Plains to the train yard and is the train that everyone in lower Westchester and the Bronx uses), so by the time it hits White Plains, all the seats are taken. I'm about 3 stations up from White Plains, so I get on at a point where finding a seat isn't hard; it's just a matter of who you want to sit next to. I - out of spite - will sometimes pick the person who has put all their bags on the seat next to them; this is a peak-hour train, someone is going to be sitting next to you. Move your shit. You're not special. 

But some mornings I am actually able to get a row to myself for a couple of stations, and that's where the fun begins since it's a crapshoot who is going to be sitting next to you. Most times the person is pretty innocuous, but other mornings you get the person who won't get off their phone (this is when I really love my headphones), or the jerk who would rather pretend you aren't there and sits with their legs spread so as to squish me into the side of the train. And I'm sorry, but I once had to sit next to a rather large man (he used his belly as a place to rest his Nook while he was reading), and though I say he sat next to me, he was really sitting on me since he needed more like 2 seats to be comfortable. That just isn't fair. My friend Tina once told me how when she was riding NJ Transit a little Asian woman was sitting next to a rather large Americana and the conversation went something like this:

"Excuse me, sir, but you're taking up a lot of my space."

"Well, you're smaller than me. I'm sorry."

"But I am sitting here as well."

"There's nothing I can do."

"Well maybe if you weren't so FAT this wouldn't be a problem."

...

I'm not sure that's quite the right reaction, but you are pretty much boxed into a corner. Say something about them squishing you, you're fat-shaming and you look like an asshole. Don't say anything, and you're left feeling angry and ashamed of yourself for not being able to drum up the courage to defend your space. 

And at the risk of sound like an old lady (DAMN KIDS AND THEIR NEWFANGLED TECHNOLOGY), people who sit on their tablets the entire train ride really look like assholes. Phones are at least small, but there's something so unwieldy about a tablet that anyone scrolling through nonsense, playing games or going shopping (no one on a tablet is ever doing work) looks pretty fucking ridiculous. The exaggerated wrist-flick and finger-dance only makes it look all the more cumbersome. There's also something very exhibitionist about someone on a tablet since none of them have those protective screens that keep people from looking over your shoulder (do those even exist for tablets like they do for your cellphone?). They're leaving it all out there for others to see. Whenever I see these people (and there are a lot in Westchester since everyone has money and a desire to buy shiny new toys), I can't help but imagine people talking on their shoe-sized cell phones back in the early 90s. I'm sure tablets are just the beginning of another branch of technology, and in a couple of years the tablets we're using today are going to look pretty damn ridiculous. Though admittedly, I get a huge kick out of old episodes of The X-Files and seeing Mulder and Scully yelling each other's names into what have to be the largest cellphones ever produced.

Smart, Maxwell Smart

Most of the time, though, I nod off or play around on my phone (yeah, I'm one of those assholes now too) for the 40+ minutes on the train. I also got really really excited last night when I watched the pilot of 30 Rock (thanks for the Netflix, Kara!) and they show a "TOPLESS GO-GO GIRLS" sign that I see every morning on my way into the station when Tracy and Liz step out of a strip club. I KNOW WHERE THAT IS!!! 

Classiest blog post ever?

I see that sign twice a day. Aren't I lucky?

I happened to be flipping through the New York Times (mostly to look for non-blogger reporting on the arrest of protesters in Union Square yesterday... free speech at work?) and stumbled across an article about a so-called "trainfan" who rides the same line as I do (the Metro-North Harlem line). She's photoblogging all the train stations... um, I don't get it. I guess everyone has to have their "thing" and hers happens to be train stations, but I don't know that I've noticed anything remarkable about any of the stations around Westchester. They are all kind of old, run-down and flood-prone (just ask Irene), and most days I wonder what I spend $266 a month on anyway. Hawthorne station always, always smells like urine, day or night. I hope I never, ever get seated next to this woman since I really dislike it when people try to strike up a conversation on the train. Sorry, I also think of my commute time as me time since it's about the only point in my day I am, for all intents and purposes, alone and don't have to talk to anyone. 

At least the walk from GC to my office is short. For those unfamiliar with Manhattan (and that's a surprising number of you. DON'T YOU REALIZE NEW YORK IS THE CENTER OF ALL THAT HAS AND EVER WILL EXIST?!?!), here's another handy little map:

If you don't know who/what Slimer is, we can't be friends.

And the other nice thing about this part of my commute is that I can push past everyone because that's totally fine in New York. What I couldn't stand in Seattle was when I had somewhere to go (BUSY AND IMPORTANT, OUT OF MY WAY), I would get the dirtiest looks from other pedestrians as I weaved in and out of traffic. As if it's some huge affront for me to let them know I think they're fucking slow. YOU'RE OFFENDING ME. Ahem. But here in New York, I routinely have someone who is going faster than me (which therefore means they are busier and more important, of course) blow right passed me. And that's totally fine: law of the jungle, folks.

I do basically the same thing in reverse on my way home with one huge imposition, and that would be the train schedule. I get out of work at 6:25pm every night, and the next train that would take me back home is at 6:33. If you look at my time estimates on my commute, the 10 minutes to and from the station gets me to GC at 6:35 and needing to wait close to 30 minutes for the next train. I usually just wait for the next one, though at one point this week I basically ran on the street and the station like a retarded Cinderella since my beaten-up black flats kept falling off to catch the 6:33 and I actually made it. But that was such a hassle, and I had also gotten lucky in that the elevator was basically waiting for me on the 29th floor and no one else got on on the lower floors. So essentially I spent an hour and 30 minutes commuting on my way home, which is an additional 2 1/2 hours every week, and 10 hours every month. Ugh.

And so it will be until January or so when I am finally able to move out. I would like to have my own place sooner than for that, but events have conspired to keep me here in Westchester until at least the end of December (that is for an upcoming blog post, I promise. Some of you know already, and others will find out in due course. For now, just suffice it to say this is not something I want to do, but have no choice in). And even then it is a question of a) finding a place at a reasonable price (I'm thinking Queens since all the yuppies in Brooklyn have driven up rent prices), and b) whether I really want to move in the dead of a New York winter. So until then, it will be the same routine, obstacles and annoyances every morning and every night.

I'm not even going to do the math on how many hours of my life will be held hostage over the next few months. I look at the people who clearly own property in Westchester (i.e., the rich, older white people) and wonder how the hell they can stand to lose so much time in their lives. For now, I'm just going to soothe myself with the thought that Mad Men is filming for next season and there are pictures like this of Jon Hamm for me to ogle:

Hubba hubba. Objectification cuts both ways, folks.