I dropped my little car off yesterday morning. On the drive, I felt excited and happy. The paperwork was easy and the guy who helped with it was friendly, polite, and efficient - the trifecta of how to run a successful business.
As I prepared to leave, I thought it would be nice to take a picture and send it out to those who knew where I was and what I was doing. Strange that when I found the car parked against a wall and took the photo, I began to feel sad. Again attempting to follow my feelings I asked myself about those feelings. Actually my sarcastic self asked my sensitive self, "Oh please, you're not feeling all sad and weepy about a car, are you?"
And I had to answer myself that, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what I was feeling - sad and weepy about a car. As I walked to the bus stop, this unleashed quite a few more questions.
The bus took quite a while and I was in a rather trashy part of town so the feelings began to turn to doom and gloom. "Oh my God, I've really done something stupid."
Boarding the bus changed my frame of mind. This due, in part to the fact that I have fond memories of riding on the bus with my grandmother. Funny how one's mood can be so quickly and effectively altered by a change in surroundings.
I was ruminating about my relationship with my car - my former car - and how my feelings were probably very reasonable given that the car has been a good friend for three years and that I've had a good relationship with many cars for a long time.
My wandering thoughts stopped abruptly when the bus driver suddenly began singing. He sang loudly. He sang with an operatic voice. And he sang in Chinese.
This is exactly the kind of stuff I've been shielding myself from while hiding in my personal transportation pod these years. It takes giving up your car to be reminded that there are people out there who just spontaneously burst out in song.
And what's wrong with that? Really. At first I was taken aback and shocked and a little embarrassed for the driver. But nobody else on the bus seemed to have a similar reaction. That's because they get it. Not everybody acts like you do. Not everybody has to act like you do. It's ok. It's ok to just start singing in Chinese while you're driving the muni.
The ride home after work was uneventful. And it would have taken a lot to measure up to my ride to work so I anticipated boredom for a few days. I mean, think about the odds...
However on the ride to work this morning, a man not only measured up, he exceeded my expectations for odd distractions.
This guy was in the back of a sparcely populated bus, wearing headphones, talking loudly. No big deal, he's talking on the phone.
No - he wasn't talking on the phone. He was talking to himself, or perhaps an imaginary friend. He was talking about the Spanish Inquisition and then laughing loudly. Then he began singing ...."..those bare necessities..." over and over. It became obvious that the man was either drunk or not in his right mind.
Just like the operatic driver, everyone on the bus ignored this man. No one sat near him. He had the back to himself. I wondered how amusing it would be to learn that he was really a psych student in grad school, doing research. Research on just how many people could sit on a bus and pretend not to notice what sounded like a very loud, raving lunatic in the back seat.
He will report in his thesis that very many people, in fact all the people on the bus were able to ignore him. Just as a busload of people were able to ignore the bilingual, singing driver.
It occurs to me that maybe I'm not going to rejoin the human race as a non-driver. Maybe I'm going to grow a thick shell and ignore the human race even more than I did in my personal driving pod.
The guy got up. walked to the front of the bus and serenaded the bus driver before he got off. And he got off right in front of a church. He might be a lapsed churchgoer. Could that be the condition that drives his behavior? I almost burst into spontaneous applause but did not want to attract his attention. Just in case he is not a grad student doing research.
I managed to leave work and ride to a dinner engagement, arriving on time, and felt no guilt at accepting a ride home. :)
This was day #2. 363 to go!
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