On Public Transportation: A Two Part Post

Recently I've been unpacking my ideas about what it's like to ride public transportation consistently. I would prefer to write two blog entries about it separately, as my first entry is going to to be based more on personal experiences and observations while my second entry will dive more deeply into some societal issues at play about ableism and transportation. If you're more interested in what I have to say about bias and moving around, come back for the next post which should be up sometime by the end of next week.

A brief rundown of my transportation history: while I was growing up I lived in an area where not driving was virtually impossible. I got a car before my junior year of high school and lived in it until going to college. I took it with me to my sophomore year and while I didn't drive it as much while I was there, it was still an integral part of my life.

In college I lived in a small town where you could walk to get everything you needed; however, you definitely needed the car if you wanted to go anywhere outside of the town or if you wanted to buy quality booze. That being said, minus the drives to the nearest "big city," I totally could have bought all of my booze by using a bike to drive to the state-operated liquor store that was two miles (more or less) down the road.

When I graduated I wanted to be able to live somewhere where I wouldn't need a car. One of the biggest considerations was money; I knew I wouldn't be making enough of it to justify having a car. I wouldn't be able to pay for car insurance or upkeep. I also want to put my money where my mouth is. I talk a salty game about caring for the environment, or at least loving big cities, and if I lived in a place where I needed a car on a day to day basis, then I feel I wouldn't be doing my ideals any justice. I'm not saying that having a car or not having a car has any meaning in terms of who you are as a human being. However, we have to acknowledge that we are on the verge of a major planetary shift when it comes to fuel; as such, I wanted to try my hand at having a smaller carbon footprint.

I made the big move to Chicago and started living life as a free-wheeling walker, bus-rider, and train-taker. However, a few months after I moved here, I got a temporary (but still relatively long-term) job in the suburbs that made my public transportation commute quite long. In the morning, it isn't such a big deal (it is about an hour door to door) but in the afternoons the train doesn't come until 30+ minutes after I get out of work, so the commute ends up ranging from an hour and 15 to an hour and 45 minutes long. This amount of time is insufferable for me because I am all about efficiency, and as somebody who lived in car culture for most of her life, I don't understand having to wait thirty minutes for a train. For that reason, I participated in an after-work carpool for three months. Basically this meant that a couple of my coworkers were generous enough to drop me off on their way home since we all lived in relatively the same area. However, somewhere along the line the situation got complicated and I decided to start taking the train home.

That was actually four days ago. I'm in the first week of riding the train home regularly, and I am struggling with it. For one thing, it is common for the train I take to show up 15 minutes later than scheduled because of a "boarding passenger" (I have never been clear on who could delay a train 15 minutes by boarding but I will take the intercom's word for it). Secondly, the train system that I have to take (the Metra, for all of you Chicagoans) does not announce the plans of the train arriving in the station. On my second day of riding the train home, I distractedly boarded a train that was going to run express from my work stop to downtown. I didn't get home until 630 that day, 2 hours and 10 minutes after I left work, because of all the backtracking I had to do. It was a brutal experience. And my third point is that the Metra is LOUD. You think the CTA is loud but then you're standing next to a train that has got to be a couple tons heavier than the longest CTA train and it's blasting past you with the DING DING DING of its bell and all you want to do is curl up in the fetal position in bed and listen to the cars dimly rush past your window. Anything but this loud, awful train!!!!!!!!!

But one of the most interesting (for better or for worse) things about public transportation is the people. I enjoy looking at them and knowing who is on my commute. It's a strange phenomenon when you ride in the same vehicles with the same people every day and you don't know their names. This evening, I took a bus I don't normally ride on weekdays to the bank, and I saw a man who is always on my morning commute. It felt like I was seeing a ghost and I kept stealing glances at him. I have no idea if he recognized me, as he is the stoic type.

Even though I enjoy knowing all of these people by face, fundamentally I am not interested in them talking to me. I am introverted, and when I am freaking out mentally about my commute, I need my space. This anonymous privacy is not always possible and you can bet your bottom dollar that I am PISSED OFF when somebody insists on talking to me past a couple of platitudes about life on the rails. It makes me wonder a lot about my life philosophy: I believe what makes my life rich is the people that populate it; however, I am entirely uninterested in meeting people when I'm transporting myself to a destination. I know I'm not alone in this: it's why we have our ipods and our books and our newspapers and our phones and our etcetera. I just wanted to point out the inherent fallacy in the fact that I complain constantly about it being difficult to meet people after college when I'm surrounded by them every day. I doubt seriously that I'll be meeting my next BFFer on the train to work, but should I be open to the idea?

Sigh. Now that I've worked through that via blog post, tune in next post to read my thoughts on the intersection of the disabled and public transportation.

on history, being middle class, writing a blog, everything in the history of mankind!

I've been reading a book of essays by Sarah Vowell that my roommate lent me called Take the Cannoli. It's an interesting enough book, one I like but don't love, and only occasionally does her writing hit a nerve. I will say that we don't have too much in common in the way that we live our lives but it's cool to read about someone from Oklahoma who lives in (or has lived in) Chicago and wrote a lot in the 90s.

Regardless, this quote in particular piqued my interest and I thought: this is it. This passage is the impetus for me to write the definitive Blog Entry about Identity and History in the United States as a White Middle Class girl aka The Search for Authenticity.

In one particular essay Vowell writes about a road trip that she and her sister took following the route of the Trail of Tears. They went on the trip because they are part Cherokee. At the end, they meet up with their aunts and uncles in their hometown in Oklahoma. Vowell talks to her uncle Hoy about this life, a man who fought in WWII and never received any education past the third grade because he worked on a farm. During this conversation she thinks, "All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break. Still, compared to him, compared to the people we descend from, I am free of history. I'm so free of history I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it" (p. 156).

Ah, the idea that we are free from history. I wrangle with this concept a lot. Sometimes I feel like such an unspecified mass that who's gonna bother with me? I'm a person who is not unlike a million other people, in that I have a college education and pierced ears and I like to shop at Urban Outfitters. As a member of the educated upper middle class with a family that came to America generations over generations ago, I feel no ties to any particular place. When I go home to North Carolina I hate driving and love the heat. When I come back to Chicago I love the public transportation and hate the cold. When I tell people where I'm from they ask why I don't have a Southern accent. Every time I go to my grandfather's home I find myself searching through photo albums, looking for images of people that preceded me, searching for a narrative of life before myself.

All of these examples are supposed to illustrate the fact that I feel like a tweener: can't stay here, can't go there, don't feel connected anywhere. Sometimes it feels like I'm supposed to aspire to the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. As a pop culture fiend I'm constantly inundated with images of consumerism. I want to travel everywhere, I want to buy everything, I want a big ass house with like, a gigantic venetian glass chandelier. I want to see the entire world anonymously, fitting into every culture like drops in the great flowing rivers of cultures in the world.

But I also just wanted to feel rooted to a place. I want people to know where I am from by looking at me, by the way I talk. I want to feel rooted to a time. I want histories that affect me, causes that inspire me. Fuck, I want to be like the hobbits in Lord of the Rings: constantly dreaming of my ideal place, the shire of the human race, if only I could return there after I dump this ring in that big fiery volcano.

This issue is something I've discussed with my brother before, perhaps more eloquently. What it boils down to is that sometimes I feel like I'm on a gigantic quest for Authenticity. When I'm outside of the South I like to talk about North Carolina barbeque because it makes me sound like someone who is rooted to a place, who knows her background. But the truth is that I rarely eat barbeque. And that one of my earliest memories is barfing barbeque all over my grandparents' floor because my stomach couldn't handle all the meat. And I don't know that much about the Civil War, although I do know where Stonewall Jackson's nickname came from (kind of). I'm free to drift the waves of the internet, of culture, of place, and of time, but all I find myself doing is wistfully hoping that someday I'll find a place where I want to be permanently.

I understand that this feeling is a romanticization of time and place. Do I really want to grow up in a culture where all of the men I know are shipped off to an unfeeling trench war? Do I want to have deal with Prohibition? With slavery? With famine? With even more serious misogyny and sexism?

All I can really say is that I'm too poor to spend the rest of my life globe trotting and too rich to stay in one place without suffering from some sort of unhappiness in relation to the fact that I never "escaped" my hometown, so I'm stuck jumping around until something smacks me in the face and tells me to stay put. Oh, the trials of a poor little rich white girl. I know I sound pathetically privileged but it's the truth. Can any of you relate to this feeling?

WHAT MOM WANTS

postcards from yo momma reblogged.

plant watering day

So every saturday in our apartment it's plant watering day. My roommate and I made this pact because in our previous apartment in college, we managed to kill all of our plants through the perseverance of sheer neglect. When we got here, we knew things would be different. We decided to take better care of our plants and our pets and so far it's going smashingly.

Somewhere along the way plant watering day became a phrase that we sang to this David Shrigley poem that is performed by John Shankie on David Shrigley's worried noodles album. It's called "A Song" and I've linked it below. (BTW if you don't know who david shrigley is, he is a god. Links to the worried noodles site and his website).



Today at work I decided to write the full parody to this song, about plant watering day. I give you the full parody below (it would help if you sang it with the tune of the song):

Plant watering day
Watering the plants
Break out the water
Do a little dance

Each plant is special
In its unique way
If you forget that
I'll punch you in the face

Plants are so great
Changing the air
We should always water them
It is only fair

When our plants die
Let's not have regrets
About how we care for them
We are in their debt

They give us flowers
and lots of growth
When we bought them from the shop
We took an oath

They reduce noise
and lower our stress
We still want our plants
to look their very best

So don't forget the day
Remember the plan
Plants needs their water
To increase their life span

DON'T FORGET TO WATER YOUR PLANTS

Moving on and Moving Out: observations

While I was getting off the train today I walked behind two noteworthy people that I felt I had to share with someone. My roommate is at work (for once! uh guh guh guh, please don't take this personally dear roommate oh god what have I done will the home environment be the same PLEASE SOMEONE THINK OF THE CAT). So I turn to you, my readers. Because that's what everybody wants out of a blog they read. For their blogger to needless tell them details about their day. Hey, if you're single and petting a cat right now: I'm here for you. I try to do what I can for the little people.

To continue on my train of snarkathon 2009, I decided to dub this a moving and moving out post because I recently switched the formatting on the way tags are displayed (didja notice?) and every time I tag something with consistency, it makes the word BIGGER. Oh my god this is meta, what I'm writing about right now, which is me writing about the blog that I am writing, did you see what I did there?

(btw honest to god this is normally what I'm like when I get home from work because I have to be mostly silent all day).

So, some shit that I experienced today (oh hell, shit I experienced recently):

1) Three Douchey McDouchersons in the corporate cafeteria (Yes I work for a big ass building downtown for a big ass corporation, and NO please do NOT post the name of my Corp in the comments if you know what it is...oh yeah I quit that other job I had. Kthxbai.) were talking about some test that they had to take. This may have been the SAT writing portion for all I know. Then this one guy, he gets all excited about what he wrote in his essay. "OH MY GOD," he tells his friends, "I WROTE ABOUT VONNEGUT ON THE ESSAY." OMG sez his friends. "YES I KNOW! I FELT SO AWESOME, DROPPING ALL THAT KNOWLEDGE. SO WHEN I WAS WRITING, IT WAS LIKE ABOUT THAT BOOK THAT HAD THE BOYS ON THE ISLAND AND ONE WAS A BAD BOY AND ONE WAS A GOOD BOY AND EVERYBODY LIKED THE BAD BOY." Beat...one of his friends meekly says "isn't that lord of the flies?" Douche goes on "AND THE BEST PART IS THAT UNDERPAID GRAD STUDENTS ARE GRADING THIS SHIT SO I'M SURE THEY JUST ATE IT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111"

William Golding, dude, and, uh, your friend was RIGHT. Who the hell thinks lord of the flies is vonnegut anyway? Uh guh guh guh, god, corporate financial types, they are the shit that the flies from lord of the flies are buzzing around. Or, as is the case in lord of the flies, dead pig heads on stick. Zing!

2) Today in the corporate cafeteria (never get tired of sayin' that), I heard this table of women talking about how this 60 year old woman had married someone's 95 year old rich relative and OH MY GAWD was she doing it for the money? Who was this woman? What are her motives? Surely she can't be sexually satisfied by this man! (Well perhaps if she's gone through menopause and lost all of her libido then she don't give a shit! Bring on the $$!)

This whole conversation led to a text conversation where I told my roommate that where I work is "so rich" and she said "you oscillate back and forth so much on your feelings for this place" and then I said "yeah i'm either foaming at the mouth about how much I hate it or silently weeping in the corner at the thought of leaving. It's the money." To which you ask: What's the money? The cause of your hate or your weeping? And to that I say: Yes.

3) The two people worth mentioning when I got off my train stop today:
a) A tall, very fine black man with shaved sides of his head and a stylish swept about faux hawk wearing the sweetest jacket and walkin' with a swagger.
b) A tall, not quite as fine, white man with red hair and a red beard (sometimes they are different, ok) who walked like he had knock-knees and pigeon toes. That is to say, his ankles were rolled inwards when he walked. It looked very strange.

4) I caught the 84 bus today to the red line stop which was amazing. I've discovered that if I'm running a couple of minutes late, I can catch the light to cross the street and then catch the bus in 2 minutes, which puts me at the train stop at about the normal time if I had left on time and walked the distance. Let me tell you guys, this is a miracle on ridge street. I have the morning commute down to a semi-exact science and yet the mother-effing evening commute is still a mystery to me. My stop in the morning is washington and wells but if I use that in the evening, then I have to ride around the entire loop and it adds about 15 minutes to my trip. Since I generally can't stand the commute home anyway, this is a lot. I try to assuage myself by playing mario but really I need to figure it out.

Additionally, I love that when you have your morning commute down to a science you can actually start noticing who's doing that shit with you on the regular. The only people I see pretty much every day (so far) are the bald-headed man and his wife walking down the street when I leave the apartment. I miss them on the days I catch the bus.

5) This temp job is about to leave me and I it at the end of this month, but because of Thanksgiving that means I'm probably only working 4 or 5 more days at best. I'm going to miss the stability of having a job but no more brown line for me for a while, yes thanks! Ah, temp jobs. I love thee more than I loved that permanent job I had for two days (NO JUDGING)

Moving on and moving out

When I started this blog I was imagining something that wasn't explicitly personal. It was definitely not a vision of "Are you there blog? It's me, margaret," but I did think that perhaps from time to time I would have to mention details of my life, if only because one person can only post on a blog so much if life isn't allowed to get in the way.

I'm sticking to my guns in that I'm not going to mention names or put in photographs of myself, but I've decided to start a new segment. As you can read in my blog description, I'm an unemployed college student who isn't satisfied. However, living your life in a constant state of dissatisfaction with EVERYTHING simply isn't sustainable. Sure, I'll never be totally satisfied (which is why you, blog, will always exist), but I still have to takes steps to make sure that I can move forward.

The next step is the Big Move from North Carolina to Chicago with my BFFer from college. I'm driving up north this Thursday to check out apartments and sign leases and do other such "School of Real Life" type things; however, I got to thinking today that maybe I shouldn't leave this out of the blog. Everybody I know from school is adjusting to life after college; why shouldn't my exploits in trying to become a real adult stay hidden away in the non-media-blog portion of my life? The new segment for the blog, therefore, is Moving on and Moving out--anything with this tag will be about trying to make a new life after college.

So I'm starting with a road trip to Oberlin and then to Chicago this Thursday. To give you a visual, I will be driving this map route:



(I also like the fact that this particular map of the United States makes it look like pre-Revolutionary war America)

And looking at craiglist entries along these lines.
(Although with more pictures and more detail than that particular entry. Sorry! I don't want any of you bitches stealing my future home).

Change is in the air...appropos to the 70 degree weather in NC today.

On and Out.