Commuting Karma

A couple of days ago after work I had to stop at the corner of Clark and Jackson and wait for a few minutes because the police had blocked out a route for Obama's motorcade to depart from the federal building. The entire wait had to be about 5 minutes or so, but about 3 minutes into it a lady standing near me on the corner turned to a guy by her and said, "Someone else should have won the election so we wouldn't have to go through this." I was like, oh, yes, lady, someone else should have won so you would have an uninterrupted stroll to your train. Not being interrupted for a moment on one day of our lives is certainly worth another term of inept leadership. For me, if it was an inconvenience at all, that was more than compensated for by Obama waving at all of us as he went by. It was enough to put a smile on my face, and I even had a wave of rock concert euphoria where I wanted to throw my hands up in the air and yell "Woo!"...but fortunately I kept that urge in check.

On a less novel note, that same day I encountered a higher than typical number of inconsiderate fellow commuters. I was shoved two times while boarding the train to go to work -- not the "we're all trying to get on this thing at once" kind of forward-thrust shove, but the "I want to go this way and there's a person in my way, so I shall push this individual out of my way" kind of sideways shove. The kind of shove that's easily avoided by waiting about two seconds until I've naturally moved out of their path. And then on the walk from the train to the office, a guy turned the corner and became oncoming traffic, only he decided to walk on the side of the sidewalk where everyone's going in the opposite direction from him. His solution wasn't to move over to where the traffic was flowing the same way as him -- it was to grimace at me and wave me out of his way with annoyance. I just don't get it, rude people. We're all trying to get somewhere, what's with the jolt of jerkiness to start the day?

But maybe it was my price to pay to get a wave out an SUV window from our soon-to-be President.

Protest & paranoia

This one's going to be rather random and rambly...

Can I just say I hate Christmas in America? I mean, why does it have to start before my birthday, which is in the first half of November? That means we have at least 6 weeks of Christmas, although I've heard of Christmas paraphernalia sightings as Halloween candy is being clearanced. So that puts it more at 8 weeks before the day...so that means that we start thinking about Christmas far enough in advance and spread it out for long enough that we essentially devote one day out of every week of the year to it. Doesn't that just suck away the novelty of it? And not only that, but it's not like we start giving or appreciating each other or any sort of wholesome community-based activity...we start buying. So many people complain about the commercial orgy that is Christmas shopping, but that doesn't stop most of us from participating in it and making ourselves less happy. Can't we just wait for Christmas to actually arrive and then spend it with people we love, perhaps exchanging small tokens of our affection? It doesn't seem so hard to accomplish.

On a completely separate topic, a strangely paranoid thought popped into my head recently that I'm having a hard time shaking. Sometimes I look at the people around me and wonder if any of them can get into my head and know my thoughts. It's a pretty horrifying possibility given some of the shameful and ridiculous things that pass through my brain, which I'm guessing are natural and along the lines of what pass through other people's brains as well, but all of us keep these things backstage for a good reason.