On public transit and the masses.

Up until this academic year, public transportation has been nary a blip in my day-to-day life. Unwilling to walk up hills? Take the free student bus! Need to take a trip somewhere once a year? Check, check, & re-check the bus route to make sure you make it, do it once, and vow you'll never take the bus again. Now, taking the bus is part of my everyday life. I have a daily commute: 25 minutes to get on campus, 45 minutes to get home (usually, because of traffic; sometimes it's only 30 or so). This isn't really inconvenient for me, because I, ideally, get some time to wrap myself up in headphones and ignore the world for a while, or make a dent in my mountains of homework. It's a sort of interlude between work and home, during which I can calm down, forget the day, all while sardined between at least two people, if not more. 

The whole "forgetting the day" thing the ideal, though, and it rarely happens. There's always people on the bus who are chatty, or loud, or under the age of 5, or distracting in one way or the other, and inevitably I spend my time people-watching, baby-oogling, or (deliberately) people-ignoring. On my route, there's a guy who will (and does) talk to every single person on the bus and, if they have a young child, he will congratulate them on being parents. Intrusive? Yes; Harmless? Completely. Yesterday on the bus, I saw someone who looked like my twin. We started talking, and it turns out she knows people I know, is in my department, and has the same professional aspirations that I do (birth doula!). Pretty remarkable. A few days ago, I gleefully watched a female toddler enjoy the hell out of a piece of caramel. Today, a toothless, but smiling, old woman who works at Salvation Army (she told me) started talking to me about the Famous Daves' ribs she was holding in her lap and, subsequently, about the fat blunt she was going to roll when she got home. The list goes on.

Sometimes the bus totally blows, and sometimes it's a revelatory experience, providing me with a place to sit and be transported physically to my destination, and mentally -- sometimes by force, sometimes by choice -- into the worlds of people I'd never otherwise interact with. Sometimes the bus is just the bus. Mostly, though, it's an experience in humanity: being stuck in a smelly, hot, and strange soup of people, of which I misguidedly feel as though I don't belong, only to be struck with the realization that I am a key ingredient in this amalgamation which is mostly comprised of the tedious, flavorless drone of living but, threaded throughout, is the occasional, smile-inducing, day-improving spot of laughter, complicated characters, and unpredictable happenings. 

I'm afraid that I'm making it sound too cinematic. It's not like we all look at each other and smile knowingly that we are going through different but similarly challenging life paths and at the end we all hug and cry. It's just that sometimes the bus isn't all that bad, and sometimes it is really bad, and in both instances, it affirms my faith in humanity and swathes me in my discomfort with the gross, unsavory side of human existence, forcing me to get the fuck over myself for at least one minute in my otherwise mind-blowingly self-centered day.

Take the bus. It'll do you good to make your day a little less comfortable.

"Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." -- Dorothy Day