Strange Interlude

Subway Morning Coming Down

iPod: Dizzee Rascal, Showtime
Books: A short story from N+1 called The Vice President's Daughter- I tuned out towards the middle when I realized the period detail- political magazines did not have blogs in 1999. Finished it, but felt vaguely irked all the same.
People: Here's where I'm very irked, because I sat from Union Square to City Hall across from a woman wearing what appeared to be a fedora, and carrying a tote bag with the name "Company X:We Destroy Your DVDs." It was such a baffling slogan, and the woman didn't seem the sort to allow her tote material to have that much irony on it. I wrote down the company name and the exact slogan on my palm, but there was a software error and the data wasn't saved.

Subway Post

Read: A third of the Oxford American Magazine's special food issue. Luckily, I had a stomache from over indulging this weekend and didn't drool on the subway.
Listened To: Kings of Convenience- Riot on an Empty Street.
Observed People: Gradually moving away from the ubiquitous iPod white earbuds, and towards the Sony behind the ear models. I bought one of those a month ago as a replacement for some missing earbuds- they produce the worst, tiniest sound imaginable. But they're less of a target for the iPod thieves, I guess.

Subway Journal: Really should come up with a snappier name for this

iPod:

• Nothing- I could say I deliberately left it at home so as to be more in touch with my world, (and I did know someone, during the Pre-Pod era, who said that wearing headphones on the subways was an abdication of your civic duty as a New Yorker, and meant it quite seriously), but I realized I had forgotten it after I locked the apartment

Reading:

• First 40 pages of Mrs. Dalloway. I read about that much a month ago, and then when I went to pick it up again, found I lost my place.
  

Delays:

• Three. One on the R train between 36th St and Queens Plaza (two minutes or so), and two on the 4 train, one  between Brooklyn Bridge and Fulton St.(about 10 minutes, but that may just be cramping on the 4 between 59th St. and Wall St.), one between Eastern Parkway and Franklin Ave.
• I have no idea, incidentally, what value this information is to anyone. I always have this imaginary view of myself plugging the numbers into a spreadsheet and figuring out the ideal way to travel around this town. Yes, I have the dullest fantasy life imaginable.

People:

• A couple engaged PDLP (Public Display of Lint Picking)- shirt lint, not body. Still gave me a weird "I don't want to be watching this feeling," but I was squeezed up against them.
• A bunch of people reading the Op-Ed page of the Post. Most of the time  people skip over that section completely, or just get the gist of it from the headlines and skip to the comics  because we're a bunch of liberal terrorist-coddling symps, but today people were engrossed in it. Maybe they wanted to know what the board thought of the new pope (take a wild guess). The Post is loading slowly or not at all, but the Op-Ed headlined "A Pope for the Grown-Ups," doesn't that seem to imply some sort of insult to past popes?

No Subway today

Ended up having the most disastorous car ride to work ever, which ended with the driver spitting at me as I wrote down his license plate number. It is one of those things that I think we will never speak of again.

Subway Journal

As some readers of this site's previous incarnations may know, I have a longish commute in to work every morning. I take the R train at Steinway St. at 7:30 to 59th St/Lexington Avenue. From there, I take the 4 train downtown and through Brooklyn all the way to the last stop at Crown Heights/Utica Avenue. I then transfer to the 3 train, and take it to its last stop at New Lots Avenue. Then there's a brisk 15 minute walk through East New York to my office so that I can arrive by 9.

To relieve some of the tedium, I figured I'd use this blog to keep a regular journal of my travels, music that I listen to, what I'm reading, people I encounter, and any unusual events, announcements, people etc.

Before I get to the list, I might as well add a link to Travis Ruse's gorgeous subway blog Express Train. It's the really the antithesis of the much linked Flickr set of photos of people looking depressed at Disney World. Not that anyone looks particularly cheery in his huge daily photographs of people on the subway, but they manage to make the subway seem so strange and beautiful and new that I have difficulty even associating the photos with the locations I slog through half asleep, trying not to meet anyone's eyes.

If I ever end up posting photographs of the subway on here, they'll be taken with the crappy little Treo 600 camera (it's the same one that the shot of me on this page is taken with.) There are a few photographs that I've gotten out of there that have an eerie abstract quality (translation: you can't see anything), but mostly it's just crap.