~Thursday~ I’ve seen the man before who sat in the seat in front of me on the bus this morning. I’m quite sure he’s a veteran of some war. He wears some sort of orange medical band on his left wrist and usually has his walking cane draped over the seat in front of him. My guess is that he’s usually on the way to the VA hospital in Durham whenever I see him on the bus.
Today, he kept falling asleep in his seat. I don’t know if it was from being tired or from being sick. He had on a black backpack, which he kept on while in his seat, so he had to sit a little sidesaddle to accommodate it in the seat. The thing is, he sat on the right side of the bus, but in the left seat, with his back to the window. And instead of falling back on his backpack against the window, he kept falling to the left, so jerking awake each time right before falling out of his seat onto the aisle floor. It just made me a nervous wreck the entire way. Not to make him all about me, but afterall, it is my blog.
He had on what I at first thought was a tank top. It was gray, and the reason I thought it was a tank top was that his left shoulder was totally exposed, and I thought, “He didn’t bother pulling the strap up over his arm.” But then I looked at the rest of his shirt, which was pulled all cockeyed because of the way he was wearing it, and I noticed that the right shoulder was completely covered; it was a regular t-shirt. He just hadn’t bothered putting his left arm through the arm hole. It just stuck out of the neck hole along with, well, his neck.
The backpack on his back was totally precarious. Every point where a strap connected to fabric, it did so by one or two strands of remaining thread, so that at any moment any one of them could break. I thought, “I wish I had a backpack with me that I could give him.” And then I wondered how that would be received.
At the bus stop close to the Gorman and Western Boulevard intersection, a piggy banker got on and at the end of the clanging, she turned to the bus and appealed, “Anyone have a quarter?” Crickets. I felt my pockets, but had no change. I even felt around the bottom of my briefcase for some coins.
“Just take a seat,” the bus driver said, rescuing her.
The next stop brought us a “partial” piggy banker. He put in a dollar, followed by seven coins. Yes, I counted them, and then found myself thinking about what combination of seven coins could’ve made up that second dollar. I decided on two quarters and five dimes.
I continued working on the reorganization and importation of a website into our content management system today.
At lunch time, I met five-sixths of the Salon (We missed you, Etta!) over at Cup A Joe’s at Mission Valley, where we waited with bated breath to see the “fire in the hole” of one member who was coming directly from having her hair did—with a red tint. Turned out she’d only had the hair on her head did.
Brad graciously gave me a ride back to campus, and on my walk from where he parked back to my building, I passed a college co-ed who had this word, all in caps, stretched across the ample (the word “rack” comes to mind) bosom of her light blue t-shirt: CUTTERS. The thing was, she was holding a cell phone up to her right ear in such a way that her arm partially covered the word, so all I saw was, “UTTERS.” I laughed out loud even though I knew it was “spelled wrong” for what I was thinking.
I love this cartoon from The New Yorker magazine:
I caught the 6:00 bus home for an uneventful ride.
I received this writing affirmation on Facebook from my friend Julie, with whom I was in the Nematomes Book Club for over ten years:
| Julie Proctor: Here’s your first affirmation of the day… at least on your FB page. Every single time I read one of your blog entries I get a giggle! You paint the funniest pictures with your words John. 😀 |
Once home, I kept putting off going to the gym, and almost caved in completely, but at 8:45 left for a 9:00-10:00 workout. I was surprised at the number of people that were in the gym when I arrived, although by 10:00, it had cleared out a lot.
I did 300 (15 sets of 20 reps) ab crunches, followed by 30 minutes on the elliptical for a 565 calories burned cardio workout. I listened to the second half of the Mariah Carey playlist I had started on my last workout.
Back home, I did a little bit of volunteer work for Manbites Dog, and then read a little bit of Two Little Girls in Blue before lights out. I’m about a third of the way through this Mary Higgins Clark book, and it’s interesting, albeit not what I’d call compelling.