Tag: commute

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Stupid girls, stupid pepper spray, stupid racist cab driver

A listing of grievances:

  • Two stupid girls have a hair-tearing fight on the bus
  • Liquid and curly fries fly everywhere
  • The guy in front of me puts up his arm, so I do too
  • The fighting high school girls roll out the door as it stops
  • I continue listening to my podcast, because, meh, stupid girls
  • People start coughing and opening windows
  • PEPPER SPRAY! Hooray!

Interlude

  • The guy in front of me has pepper spray in his eye
  • I have some on my face
  • The fighting girls are long long gone
  • We all have to get off the bus
  • We are coughing
  • We are annoyed
  • The 24 bus comes roughly every three years
  • Why can’t they fight on a busier route?

Interlude

  • My cheek hurts and I want to go home
  • I get a cab
  • I tell the driver what happened
  • He immediately asks “What race were they?”
  • I ask him what that has to do with anything
  • He tells me he is interested in “Sociology”
  • I say anyone who knows a damn thing about sociology knows better than to draw from a single data point
  • I tell him that we aren’t going to talk any more
  • He tells me he isn’t racist because he campaigned for Obama

Interlude

  • I stiff him on the tip and go inside to take a shower
  • Stupid girls
  • Stupid pepper spray
  • Stupid racist cab driver
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Breaking news! Sheep Escape!

This morning as I was driving to work I became embroiled in local Farm Drama.

Let me back up.

Photo by Cryptia 30 Apr 07, 10.59PM EDT.

I live, at least for the next week or so, in upstate New York. Among other things, such as a dearth of decent tamales, living upstate means being surrounded by rolling hills and farmland.

There’s a big contingent of young hipster organic farmers in the area. I live across the street from a small sheep farm. The woman who owns the farm has about 20 sheep.

Depending on which field they are in, I can hear them through the open windows in the morning. It’s nice.

This morning I drove by the sheep farm and saw a distinctly sheeplike rustling in the tall grass next to the road. Two lambs had wiggled through the gate and were standing wide-eyed on the wrong side of the fence.

I pulled over and tried to find the farmer, but her truck was gone. It was up to me. The occasional car whooshed past the loose sheep.

I was wearing Work Clothes. I wasn’t prepared for any sheep wrangling, but I decided to try anyway.

The whole thing ended anticlimactically. The lambs were so terrified to see me walking toward them that they wiggled back through the gate. Problem solved. I left a note and went to work strangely pleased with my ability to frighten sheep.

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The call of our Zombie Masters

Now that the students are back in town I have company on my morning commute. Dozens of us trudge up the hill at 8am, shuffling up the steep slope to campus in unison, a long line of sleepy students and faculty heeding the call of our zombie masters.

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Small town conundrum

One of the Cornell campus bus drivers sells homemade maple syrup out of a box next to his seat. I see him about one out of every ten times I ride the bus, which usually launches me into this cycle of feeling like I should buy some just to support the weirdness of the endeavor, but not actually wanting any maple syrup.