Perverse Transcript. Ase.
Shut up. It's late, I'm tired, I need a pun to title this post so I can go to bed. Said post will commence now:
Commuters are a jaded crowd. This morning a young man used the train I was riding to commit suicide, and no one on board was even surprised. I mean, I wasn't. It's not my first experience of suicide by train. Two weeks ago there was a fatal shooting on the tracks ahead of us and I didn't get home till 11:40 pm; suicide actually represented an improvement. I was expecting gallows humor, but this morning's crowd skipped directly to selfishness and rancor. "Why did he have to jump in front of my train?" was the most popular sentiment, followed by "If he'd had any consideration he would have jumped in front of a freight." I can see why trains are such a popular method. If by some miracle you survive the impact, the passengers will surely finish you off.
So after I had waited three hours on a track less than two miles outside of the Davis station, with my opinion of the species rapidly plummeting, a train going the other way finally received clearance to pull up next to us and take on passengers. "If you want to go back to Davis or Sac, this is the last train that will be by for hours," we were told. Seeing as how I can drive and all, I figured this wasn't a bad strategy. I began to reevaluate when I found myself in a car full of hyperactive three year olds. Then I moved to the next car and found it full of hyperactive eighth-graders and decided to skip the rest of the day and make an appointment to have my tubes tied. If I hadn't had a 4:30 meeting in Berkeley I would have followed through, too. I found a seat next to a stable-looking person and gazed out the window just in time to see my old train take off for the Bay.
Half an hour later I pulled back into Davis, having missed all my classes and made exactly no progress since I left 3.7 hours before. On the bright side, this meant I would now have the opportunity to drive into Berkeley for the first time, an activity which I had heretofore classed alongside skydiving. In my opinion that justified a nopales salad before I left, so I went by my pimp's office at the newspaper to pick up the car and whine. He was very nice to me for a pimp. After he bought me lunch he even showed me where the gas cap was and made up helpful mnemonic devices for filling up the tank like "now the eel visits the cave." We took this metaphor, by the way, from Memoirs of a Geisha, a film which Mike said deserved the year's award for Greatest Achievment in Making me Feel Icky. Dara called as I was about to get in the car. "How are you?" she asked. "Homicidal," I answered, "But thanks for asking."
The drive, I must say, was almost pleasant. I dug up a mix tape Sarah made in the summer of 1998, which I think she may have left in the car when she drove out with us to New Mexico. I found that singing helps me to behave less maniacally on the road, but it was odd to realize that I could do anything in the car. I mean, there I was, singing "Accentuate the Positive" in plain sight of nine or ten strangers, and no one was the wiser.
I'll skip over the details of my afternoon. Suffice it to say that at work everyone whose signature I needed was on a motiveless leave of absence, and that the little runt behind the counter at Parking & Transportation refused to sell me more than one shuttle ticket, not even a round trip. Around 4:15 I went by Dara's office to give her back the draft of her paper I was supposed to give her in one of the classes I missed. Dara works for the IRB, whose office is situated behind a quaint little dutch door. Unfortunately, when you open it, you are not generally greeted by Ann Hutchinson but by the board member whose job it is to tell your boss that he may not inject goat urine into the toddlers of Thai prisoners without a consent form. Well, maybe not you specifically. The point is, I was relieved that Dara was the one who opened it today. She asked me if my day had improved any.
"Did you ever have one of those days," I asked her, "When so many things go wrong that it starts to be funny? And so you find yourself rooting for more things to go wrong so it'll make a better story?" "I can't wait to read about it on your blog," she said. For those of you who court fame, this is always a good tack to take. Flattering the blog in my hearing is sure to get you mentioned in print. But the sick thing is, for a split second I actually considered changing the subject so Dara wouldn't know all the punchlines when she read about it later. In any case the rest of the evening was fine, pleasant even. What a disappointment.
Commuters are a jaded crowd. This morning a young man used the train I was riding to commit suicide, and no one on board was even surprised. I mean, I wasn't. It's not my first experience of suicide by train. Two weeks ago there was a fatal shooting on the tracks ahead of us and I didn't get home till 11:40 pm; suicide actually represented an improvement. I was expecting gallows humor, but this morning's crowd skipped directly to selfishness and rancor. "Why did he have to jump in front of my train?" was the most popular sentiment, followed by "If he'd had any consideration he would have jumped in front of a freight." I can see why trains are such a popular method. If by some miracle you survive the impact, the passengers will surely finish you off.
So after I had waited three hours on a track less than two miles outside of the Davis station, with my opinion of the species rapidly plummeting, a train going the other way finally received clearance to pull up next to us and take on passengers. "If you want to go back to Davis or Sac, this is the last train that will be by for hours," we were told. Seeing as how I can drive and all, I figured this wasn't a bad strategy. I began to reevaluate when I found myself in a car full of hyperactive three year olds. Then I moved to the next car and found it full of hyperactive eighth-graders and decided to skip the rest of the day and make an appointment to have my tubes tied. If I hadn't had a 4:30 meeting in Berkeley I would have followed through, too. I found a seat next to a stable-looking person and gazed out the window just in time to see my old train take off for the Bay.
Half an hour later I pulled back into Davis, having missed all my classes and made exactly no progress since I left 3.7 hours before. On the bright side, this meant I would now have the opportunity to drive into Berkeley for the first time, an activity which I had heretofore classed alongside skydiving. In my opinion that justified a nopales salad before I left, so I went by my pimp's office at the newspaper to pick up the car and whine. He was very nice to me for a pimp. After he bought me lunch he even showed me where the gas cap was and made up helpful mnemonic devices for filling up the tank like "now the eel visits the cave." We took this metaphor, by the way, from Memoirs of a Geisha, a film which Mike said deserved the year's award for Greatest Achievment in Making me Feel Icky. Dara called as I was about to get in the car. "How are you?" she asked. "Homicidal," I answered, "But thanks for asking."
The drive, I must say, was almost pleasant. I dug up a mix tape Sarah made in the summer of 1998, which I think she may have left in the car when she drove out with us to New Mexico. I found that singing helps me to behave less maniacally on the road, but it was odd to realize that I could do anything in the car. I mean, there I was, singing "Accentuate the Positive" in plain sight of nine or ten strangers, and no one was the wiser.
I'll skip over the details of my afternoon. Suffice it to say that at work everyone whose signature I needed was on a motiveless leave of absence, and that the little runt behind the counter at Parking & Transportation refused to sell me more than one shuttle ticket, not even a round trip. Around 4:15 I went by Dara's office to give her back the draft of her paper I was supposed to give her in one of the classes I missed. Dara works for the IRB, whose office is situated behind a quaint little dutch door. Unfortunately, when you open it, you are not generally greeted by Ann Hutchinson but by the board member whose job it is to tell your boss that he may not inject goat urine into the toddlers of Thai prisoners without a consent form. Well, maybe not you specifically. The point is, I was relieved that Dara was the one who opened it today. She asked me if my day had improved any.
"Did you ever have one of those days," I asked her, "When so many things go wrong that it starts to be funny? And so you find yourself rooting for more things to go wrong so it'll make a better story?" "I can't wait to read about it on your blog," she said. For those of you who court fame, this is always a good tack to take. Flattering the blog in my hearing is sure to get you mentioned in print. But the sick thing is, for a split second I actually considered changing the subject so Dara wouldn't know all the punchlines when she read about it later. In any case the rest of the evening was fine, pleasant even. What a disappointment.
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