Archive | April 2011

SEDUCTION! SEDUCTION!

Apr20

My first day feeling like a human again was spent at work until 6:15pm. That’s a touch later than usual. Know what happens when I work a touch later than usual?

All the skip-stop trains are finished running for the rush hour.

AWESOME.

I waited 15 minutes for my first train, then another 10 for the connecting one, only to see that it was so packed that there was no way I was getting on it. So I waited for another train to arrive. And got a good train! With seats! Woo! A local train… but, still a train! To home! Where my family is! Except… the only seat left on said local train was next to a woman who apparently doesn’t like touching men because she wouldn’t move to her left or her right so there wasn’t actually a seat. I could have pushed the issue, and definitely would have if it had been a day earlier when me being able to stand wouldn’t have been an option, but I was feeling good so I stayed standing.

And then two stops later That Guy got on the train.

The guy who has to feel everyone up as he walks by, but does it in a way that it would be SUPER HARD to prosecute. He used his backpack to rub up against my calves. Thank goodness for knee-high boots underneath my dress pants.

And then he started out-of-tune humming along to his music which no one else could hear because he was being (considerate?) by not blasting his music to the train.

And then he started going from out-of-tune humming to saying “SEDUCTION! SEDUCTION!” and I went from bothered to pissed.

At the next stop the chick with the man issue got off the train and a woman who had gotten on the train after me looked at me to bargain for the seat. I waved my Vanna hand at it and said “ENJOY!” and walked to the other side of the car, which happened to be extremely packed, but no one was trying to be sexually inappropriate in any manner physically or vocally.

I knew if I had stayed near the man who was what other people would consider the equivalent of eating spaghetti on the train

(provided for your reference:

) I would have had to go Kung Fu Popstar on his ass… and for crying out loud I just wanted to go home so I chose to move myself out of that situation.

Moral of the story: If someone’s bothering you, you have three choices…

1. Confront
2. Act all bothered and pissy and passive-aggressive
3. Remove yourself from the situation and choose a more important battle in life

Today option number 3 was my choice. And it’s a choice I made after a lot of times making choice 1 or choice 2 and finally learning that there is another option.

Irony is a dish best served in a cast. What? Oh, stop, I’m sick.

Apr15

It’s no fun to see famous people and not be able to tell you I saw them.

Today nothing of consequence occurred.

Well, I did buy some soup and popsicles. And interrupt a meeting, at the presenter’s request, to install software. (… oh hai, i’m just the it guy bustin in on your MEETING, what WHAT! …) And make an entire train car of people think I was going to turn them into zombies with my sneezing.

But you know that’s not what I actually want to tell you and can’t. Ohh, what good Cereal Wednesday episodes I would have if I was allowed to ask them to participate…

*sneeze* *sneeze* *sneeze* Someone else help Dawg put the laundry together? Please?

ok, bye.

Do not lean on door

Apr6

On each set of subway train doors is the cautionary message “Do not lean on door”. It’s for your safety, it’s to discourage you from blocking the door, it’s to cover the MTA’s ass if you don’t listen and anything bad happens, and it’s also so you don’t break the doors and make them not open and close properly.

Everyone leans on the doors. But today’s experience was new to me.

Tonight I was sitting on the bench of a skip stop J train when a man got on the train and leaned against the door. He took off his eye glasses, put them in his pocket, and fell asleep standing up, leaning against the door. Our train doors open on whichever side of the train the platform happens to be on, so sometimes the door would open on his side and knock him back awake. I really wanted to stand up and offer him my seat, but I was barely able to fit in my seat so I knew he wouldn’t be able to fit where I was until someone else got up. Finally another seat opened up on the bench, still too small for him to sit on but I was going to stand up to offer my seat so the woman next to me would get the hint and move down… and then the doors closed on the man’s backpack and jacket. Both items pinned in the doors. He groggily started tugging at the backpack to try to pull it out of the door, then gave up for a minute.

The J train is elevated 4 stories in the air as it travels through Brooklyn and Queens. This man resumed tugging on his backpack after the train pulled away from the station. If he fell out and somehow fell over the side… death would be better than not death, most likely. I was slightly horrified that he was making such a poor decision, and I was ready to make another poor decision of grabbing the pole in front of the door and then grabbing onto this stranger to stop him from falling out the doors when he finally got his backpack out.

Hypothetically the doors would seal shut if he ever did get the backpack out, but my mind likes to explore all options and focus on the least favorable scenario as I continue to elaborate my mind’s scenario, so I was convinced I would be springing up to catch him just in time…

And then the train stopped at my stop, the doors opened, he tugged his backpack away from the doorway, and I got off the train, never knowing if that man chose to continue sleeping standing up.

Do not lean on door, people. Do not lean on door.

The writer inside

Apr1

This post is real.

Dawg and I planned the last post together. We did not break up. We are very much together, and happily so.

The words in my post were crafted as I sat on the couch, channeling my inner sadness. My inner insecurities. Conversations we’ve had. Feeling the pain of hurdles and challenges we have made it past and conquered.

Recently Dawg and I had a conversation in which we joked about us breaking up over him leaving his socks on the floor.

Socks on the floor can be replaced by the toilet seat up or dishes left in the sink or clutter being left on common surfaces or [insert something that might annoy a person]. The funny thing is, none of these things annoy me.

I am a kid at heart. And I’ve already been through the trauma of trying to live the perfect married life and failing miserably at it because I wasn’t happy.

But even with my kidlike spirit (which, I’m sorry to say, is what allowed me to post that devilish April Fool’s Day tale to the Internet in the first place), I value the importance of communication with my partner in life. We have made the pact that we are together for life, without the piece of paper that for other people is extremely necessary, but we’ve both had before and it did not end well at all. We are very serious about going on life’s journey together, which to us makes it quite laughable that we’d break up over me being mad about socks on the floor. My mom, Bdogg, Britt, and Robin have all been here, they know how we live: like teenagers putting off the chore of cleaning our room until a parental unit yells, or until we run out of clean underwear.

Things are different now that I have a new job. We are both busy. We don’t get a lot of time together. And sometimes it does feel like we’re not connecting on things… and then we say something to each other and we talk it out and we smooth things over and we move on with life.

Nothing about what I said about Dawg is directly true. He always calls, unless there is a reason why he can’t. He always greets me and the girls. He may go right to the bed, but he’s waiting for his Squishy Poppy (that’s me) to join him so we can talk about our days or take a nap together. The only time he has ever thrown Twitter off him is when he’s asleep and she bites or scratches him and he doesn’t even know what he’s doing.

Dawg is a good man. A very good man. When he read over the post ahead of its publish, his statement was “wow, I sound like a douchebag.” Since then he has been telling me over and over that he loves me and that we’re never breaking up. That’s who Dawg really is.

I do hate feet, but I find Dawg’s feet charming. I’ll even touch them. I think it’s hysterical when Twitter finds pleasure in carrying Dawg’s socks around.

I have had fear like any rational person would, about uprooting my entire Vermont life to try life in NYC. About walking into an already existing and highly complicatedly complex world. If I wanted simple I would have stayed on that couch in Vermont continuing to watch a big screen TV to pass the hours, but I didn’t do that… I chose the harder, more rewarding path.

How many times have I said I love it here? How I love riding the train? How I love my new job? How I love living in the apartment with Dawg and our furbabies? Many. I love him, I love his family, I love his friends, I love his “bad habits”, I love him when he acts like a boy and does silly things, and he always loves me, my family, my friends, my “bad habits”, when I act like a girl and do bitchy things.

I mean everything to Dawg, and he means everything to me. This is true love. True love with communication. A formula for success, as you all knew it already was.

It’s all good here.

Please accept my apologies if you felt the heartache in my post and were angry when you found out this was a joke. That post was a work of fiction, written based on life experience.