Cool Event: Pillow Fight Club’s Valentine’s Day Fight in SF
Listening to: Energy 92.7 (also on internet)
I spent quite a bit of time earlier crafting a blog post about the Army Teaching Troops How not to Marry a Jerk – the post got a little politically charged. Strangely, I had big problems with Blogger and I wasn’t able to save the post. I tried several times, and then went back to try and it find it, and it was gone.
Probably wasn’t meant to be. Therefore, I’ll let that go, and tell you why we commuters can only ever talk about that to each other.
We all have friends that fit in categories. A few that you can’t have in the same room together; the few that, if you threw a party, you’d have to sacrifice not inviting them for the good of the whole. There are all types of acquaintances. Some of which seem to be at instant odds with each other: Your single friends and married or mommy friends, your knitting buddies, techno dancing friends, expat crowd, grade school and university friends, your gym buddies, and your I-really-want-chocolate-now friends.
Usually you have something in common which binds you. An interest, an activity, a quest, a self-improvement. What happens when you have only a commute in common?
With knitting buddies, you can share new patterns, yarn finds, proudly-finished articles, even exchange or buy from each other. Your concert friends can keep you updated on the latest bands and concerts coming up. Your expat friends can help you grease the creaky and cumbersome wheel of what is known as Bureaucracy.
But what are commute friends for?
Unfortunately, not much. And they happen to be the people you may spend the most time with, involuntarily. Every day, on the train, on the bus. If it’s a bad day in the world of transport, you’ll spend the entire time talking about how ridiculous the wait or delay is. You may even include some stories from your other equally comparable horrendous days. Or of a friend of yours. Or other cities that may be experiencing worse delays than this.
And you can also recycle these stories, since the history of delays only lends added credibility to the absurdity of the current situation.
On a good day, when there is no delay, you get your bus in plenty of time, or the train arrives right about on schedule, you may spend some time remarking on how you’re lucky that today it wasn’t SO late, not like ____ day and then you can segue in the above examples of other days worse than today.
Or you can complain about the weather. Thank goodness the train is here! What a terrible day, I’ll be so glad to get home.
If for some reason, transportation is relatively on time, and the weather is quite nice, this becomes a problem.
One may remark on the nice weather. If the weekend is near or has just passed, one may also comment or ask about whether this weekend will be special, or whether the recently passed weekend was interesting.
These will be general remarks, along the lines of “How was your weekend?” or “Anything special for this weekend?”
Rarely will you foray into personal territory, and usually limited to transportation-themed topics, such as whether your Significant Other will be picking up at the station or whether you will be traveling somewhere for the weekend.
Usually these answers, skirting away from in-depth details, will be interrupted by the responder himself, and will revert back to the above-mentioned routine topics.
The rest of the time will be spent in silence. Or if you’re lucky, typing on your computer, and making soothing, concordant sounds responding to the other person that use a minimum of brain cells while the others are hard at work. Thank god for my tiny laptop, my hero, my savior, my silencer.
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