~Tuesday~ I wanted to get in earlier than I would have had I waited for the 8:15 city bus, so I took the Wolfline #1 Avent Ferry bus. Note to future self: Do not take buses that have any chance of getting students to campus on the hour.
I got on at the second stop and the bus was already so crowded that I had to stand the entire way. I’ll give the bus driver credit, though, he was vocal and he kept reiterating that the people in the aisle had to move back. “Double up side-by-side in the aisle if you have to,” he said.
I ended up holding on to a bar by putting both hands on it, one of my hands just above the hand of this guy with a very thick, reddish beard, and my other hand just below it. I didn’t look, but I imperceptibly moved my hands closer to his, until it felt slightly homoerotic. Men are pigs.
Sometimes when I ride the university buses, I look at these kids and think that clichéd thought, “You’ve got your whole lives ahead of you.” Funny thing is though, sometimes I think that with wistfulness, but sometimes, like today, I think it with pity. I mean (most of them, at least) have 25 to 30 or more years of a job, or a bunch of jobs, to work yet. I wouldn’t want to be in that place again for anything.
I had my weekly status meeting with my boss, for which I prepared for 45 minutes—which is to say from the moment I got into my office until the meeting started at 9:00.
Following that, I attended a 1.5-hour meeting, for which I was asked to take notes right before it started. Although I’m probably going to end up not participating much on the project around which this meeting was for, I was glad I attended to watch a very interesting organizational team dynamic unfold in it.
That’s all I’m going to say about it, as I don’t like to elaborate on work-related, human relations-type incidents in this public forum.
Mid-afternoon, I walked over to the university station post office to mail a letter I needed to go out today, and I was annoyed to find out that in addition to closing that post office, which I knew, they had also removed the mailbox that was there. Fuckers. I walked over to the one at Cameron Village.
Leaving my office, I headed toward downtown on Hillsborough Street, walking to Jimmy John’s to have dinner. A percentage of the sales between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. were going toward one of the NC State Alternative Service Break teams, the one going to San Francisco to work with homeless GLBT kids.
One of the sandwich makers had on a t-shirt that said this on the back: “No shoes! No shirt! No pants! No problem!” I looked at the other workers to see if this was a uniform, but it wasn’t.
After eating, I walked a little further down Hillsborough Street to the Bell Tower, where I waited for the Wolfline #9 or #1, either of which would take me close to my car.
I could see the #9 coming down the road, and I did a quick GPS-check to see where the #1 was, because I could tell that the #9 was fairly full, with people already in the aisle. TVS said that there was a #1 bus at the library, which is the stop before where I was, so I just waited for it, and sat my butt down the whole way home.
It smelled like curry on the bus, and I looked around to see if anyone had Indian takeout, or leftovers, with them.
The girl to my immediate left studied what looked like vocabulary words on flash cards made out of fuchsia-colored index cards.
A guy who stood in the aisle looked like a young version of Ted Williams, the former “homeless man with the golden voice,” who reports have it, recently checked out of rehab “AMA.”
I like things that challenge me to rethink things that I just assume are true, or that I have been assured are true. This article, Five Complaints About Modern Life That are Statistically BS debunks these “truisms”:
- Everything is so expensive.
- People are getting stupider.
- All this processed food is killing us.
- Crime is out of control.
- Today’s music is all derivative trash.
I had hoped to get two things done tonight:
- Devise a blog entry for the official NC State Alternative Service Break blog website for our spring break trip retreat that we did a week ago Saturday, which I thought would go fairly quickly, because I was hoping to re-use a lot of the writing from my personal blog entry for that day.
- Work for at least another hour or two culling minutes from those recorded minutes of the Manbites Dog 25th Anniversary Planning Gathering of a week ago Sunday.
Well, the hour that I thought it would take to do item one, turned into three hours, so I never got to item two. Oh well. I feel good about getting the first one done, and I hope to publish it after Tracy and Joyce review it at our Friday morning meeting.