It’s not over until the Bus Lady Sings (or, Bus Lady Sings the Blues)

   

I will never forget my first bus ride in Pittsburgh.  I moved to the city in July 1987 to go back to school, and was living in an apartment complex about 15 minutes north of downtown.  (Well, that’s by car; triple that time for a bus.)  Outside of riding a school bus as a kid (and a couple Greyhound buses), I was from a small town and had never used public transportation; so I was told in advance how much to pay, and where to get off in the city.  

When the PAT bus pulled up, I hopped aboard and held out my fare to the driver.  Why wouldn’t he take it?  He gestured towards the fare box.  I dropped in my coins and as I looked down the cramped aisle between fifty or so people, wondering why all the women in dress clothes were wearing white sneakers, the bus lurched forward and I literally fell flat on my face. 

That was my first lesson about riding public transportation—unlike a school bus or Greyhound, the driver doesn’t wait until you’ve found a seat.  As the weeks went by, I learned other stuff too:

• The schedule you’re holding says 7:05am but it’s 7:15 and there’s still no bus—this happened yesterday too!  (Your regular driver’s on vacation, take the earlier bus the rest of the week.)
• You’re about 20 feet from the bus stop when you see your bus approaching;  you’ve ridden with this driver a hundred times, he sees you sprinting towards that PAT sign, surely he’ll wait the 10 seconds you need to get there, right?  Haha, you just made his day! 
• Wow, empty seats in the front!  They’re empty for a reason.  There’s either an elderly couple or a young mom with her preschooler getting on a couple stops ahead.  You should’ve grabbed that empty seat in the back when you had the chance.
• The bus is nearly full but there’s a window seat available—no, it’s a wet seat available.  
• Can the bus driver tell you where the Courthouse is?  Yes.  Will he?  “Think, McFly!”  
• You’re waiting for the 19L Emsworth but this one says Ross Garage, so you step back & wave him by; you dummy, that’s your bus!  The driver forgot to change his sign!  

 

Of course, there’s a whole other set of rules for how you interact with your fellow passengers, and the reason I am sharing all of this is because there’s a woman on the 19L Emsworth who broke all of them in just one day—with me!   

This morning I got on the bus & was happily surprised to get a (dry) window seat near the back of the bus.  Lord, why hast Thou blessed me?  No sooner do I settle in though, a very large woman promptly squeezes in beside me.  Hey! 

Rule No.1:  Very wide persons needing two seats should not squeeze into a front-facing seat with another person, especially when there are empty seats in the back of the bus!

She must’ve read my thoughts because she said “I can’t sit in those seats in the back, or I get bus-sick”.  Fair enough, I resign myself to being a sardine on the trip downtown.  After the bus drones forward a couple blocks, she reaches down and pokes my leg.  RULE NO.2:  NO LEG POKING, ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE JOINED AT THE HIP.  She asks “Could you squeeze your legs together?”    RULE NO.3:  DO NOT ASK A MAN TO SQUEEZE HIS LEGS TOGETHER.  I say yes, sure and pray I fall into a coma.

So we’re about halfway downtown when she says “Candy?”  I look down and see two jeweled fingers plucking a… bon bon from a gold box.  I smile and shake my head, no thanks.  She pops it in her mouth and mumbles “you probably think I’m a big fat cow…”   RULE NO.4:  DO NOT ASK A FELLOW PASSENGER IF THEY THINK YOU’RE A BIG FAT COW.  I try to look confused and shake my head no.  She says “My husband does!”   I don’t know how to answer that, so I say nothing and hope she doesn’t either.  We finally get downtown, and for the rest of the day my right side is wearing her perfume.

I managed to put it all behind me though, and got on with my workday.  And when 4:00 rolled around, I grabbed my bag & headed for my evening bus stop (outside of Mellon Bank) for the trip home.  I like this stop, it’s the first of several throughout the city so I pretty much have my choice of where I want to sit.  And about midway downtown, guess who gets on the bus?  I see her looking at the available seats, and I almost smile because of Rule No.5:  DO NOT SIT WITH THE SAME STRANGER TWICE IN A ROW, ESPECIALLY IF THERE ARE OTHER SEATS AVAILABLE.  Heh!  Suddenly she’s standing over me.  No! 

Yes I know, legs together.  (Lady, you are breaking all the rules!)  

I winced a little as she squeezed in and got situated.  As I was sitting there wondering “Why me Lord” it hit me—my MP3 player!  RULE NO.6:  NEVER BOTHER SOMEONE WHO IS LISTENING TO MUSIC.  I quickly fumbled it out of my workbag and slipped on the earphones—ah, Partridge Family and sweet relief!  But no sooner does David Cassidy sing “I think I love you”, she taps my leg.  I turn down the player.  “What.”  She says “I can hear your music, you must have it up pretty loud.”   Grrr!   I apologize & say I’ll turn it down.  She says “It’s not bothering me.”   Then why—nevermind!

So we ride in relative silence (well, she did) until I notice the couple in front of us are smiling and making fish eyes in our direction.  I turn to my ‘partner’ and she’s staring straight ahead, mouthing something.  What the—!?  I remove my earphones and she’s softly singing “la la la”.  Huh?  She turns to me and says “The Bee Gees, right?”   I made a frown-face and said no.  She said “Then who is it!”   And just when I am about to shout the rules at her, we’re in Bellevue & thank God there’s her bus stop coming up.  She squirmed her butt out of the seat and said “My husband’s making me ride the bus now if the weather’s nice.”  When I rolled my eyes and nodded my head, she said “see you in the morning!”   Omigosh lady, not if I can help it!

God if you’re listening… I am praying for rain.

I am more than the sum of my parts—and I’ll keep saying it until I believe it

 

It’s difficult when you’re itching to get something off your chest, but you know you can’t.  I’m not talking about family matters, or something juicy confided to you by a friend who’s sworn you to secrecy, I’m referring to workplace drama.  But in a time when people are losing their jobs because of an off-color joke emailed to the wrong person, or grumbling about things a little too loudly on social sites like Facebook, I certainly don’t want to write anything here that will cost me my job in the process.

All I can say for now is that things have been a little less rosy in my corner of the office these last few weeks. 

Whether it’s the assortment of fact & fiction about big changes on the horizon, or the recent realization that a certain person of importance isn’t as impressed with me as I thought they should be, my professional life hasn’t been as stellar as I led myself to believe.

So after a couple weeks of worry and frustration, I’ve come to a couple conclusions:  nothing’s going to be changing anytime soon (I mean that in both a good & bad way) and I’ve been focusing too much energy on that one part of my life, and not enough anywhere else.  And for what? 

Awhile back, I remember reading how most men tie their identities to their jobs, much more than women seem to.  Why is that?  One psychologist theorizes it’s because men have the ‘provider gene’ hard-coded into them (even if most women today are out there ‘providing’ right alongside us). 

All I know is, I’ve been relying on my job to define who I am for the last 20 years.  I’m sure that even Picasso considered himself more than an artist… is any of this making sense?   I’m just saying that for too long now I’ve only seen myself in one light—that long fluorescent one hanging above my desk.   For as long as I can remember, my evenings and weekends have been nothing but intermissions until I can get back on the job. 

(In fact, the last time I took off more than 2-3 consecutive days was in 2003, but I had to break a leg to do it!)  I often tell my sister that if it wasn’t for the office, I’d have no social life.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my job—and I’m thankful I have enough wits about me to get paid to flex my brain, but I need to start giving more priority to things besides my company.

So I guess you could say I’m having a midlife crisis of sorts, but when you don’t have things like kids, a spouse, a church or even a sports team to invest that extra part of yourself in… what do I really want to do besides read books and watch movies?  Oprah just aired her final show and there’s only so much history on the History Channel, y’know!   

I keep telling myself that I’m going to do all sorts of fun & different things after I retire (well, that’s the plan) but who am I kidding?  What’s going to be so different compared to now?   I just need to come up with some ideas.   Or buy a bigger tv.

Well, I know this was a pretty lousy blog, and I apologize for that; I just wanted to get out what’s been circling in my head recently.  (I tell myself that maybe there’s someone out there than can relate.)  I’ll write more again very soon, I actually have a couple things in the works.  (I’m about to dive into vegan cooking, and who doesn’t want to read about that--right?)   But for now, I’m done.  

There are times when a congratulations is in order, but I don’t think this is one of them

 

I’m about to make a mountain out of a molehill here, but something happened a couple days ago and it’s been stuck in my craw ever since; do you mind if I share?   This all started a year or so ago, when I decided to remove the vertical blinds hanging in my apartment and replace them with real drapes.  

(My sister Shawn was overjoyed; she hated them.)  Anyway, I was pretty attached to those vertical blinds--they were no maintenance & allowed just the right amount of light in here.  Okay, so they were old even when I moved in here back in ‘95; a couple of them were split at the bottom, and I had a few of them scotch-taped to the slider rail because the clips had broken off.  (But that’s one of the nice things about being a single guy, you can get away with such things.)  

So last year I finally (and tearfully) ripped them down, and installed one of those patio-sized curtain rods, and hung a VERY cheap pair of curtains on them (until I figured out what I really wanted to hang, which drove my sister a little nuts as she hated the cheap curtains even more than the vertical blinds).   A guy can’t win!

I’ve spent the last year buying (and returning) probably 10 sets of drapes.  If I had known it was going to be this difficult, I would’ve just stocked up on scotch tape instead.  I hated lined curtains, they blacked out the whole apartment, and patterns that looked modern in the catalog turned my place into Pee Wee’s Playhouse.  Sheers were…well, sheers (sissy) and “eco-friendly” was just a clever way of charging 200 bucks for burlap.  I was ready to throw in the towel when I found this ‘two tone’ set of ‘flax/ivory’ grommet panels at Crate & Barrel.

Aren’t these nice?  I get lots of light & most important, they don’t look girly

In fact, I was so pleased how these turned out that I thought I’d do ol’ Crate (and customers like me) a favor & write a positive review about them on their website. 

So I’m on this product’s page, I write up something nice, hit ‘Submit’ and a window pops up:  “Your submission has been saved for review; please allow 72 hours for us to contact you if yours is selected for publication.  Good Luck!”   Waitaminute—I thought I was just leaving a review for a pair of curtains, it’s not like I entered an essay contest or submitted a funny story to Reader’s Digest… they make it sound like there’s going to be a prize.  Um…Is there going to be a prize?

A couple days later, I get an email from Crate & Barrel; this is what it says (and in a much larger sized font too):

Congratulations!

Your submission has been approved & selected for our website!  Click here to see your review

Hmm—there’s my review alright (& if you click on the link above, I’m ‘Singleguy’).  Now I don’t mean to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but—wait, there is no gift-horse ‘cuz I got nothing out of this, so why am I being congratulated?  What they should’ve sent was:

CONGRATULATIONS!   PLEASE ACCEPT THIS $25 GIFT CARD FOR HELPING US SELL THESE CURTAINS! 

Or, they could’ve just said ‘thanks’.  Okay all kidding aside, if I helped a little old lady across the street, she wouldn’t say “Congratulations, you just helped me across the street!”  SHE’D PROBABLY SAY  "THANK YOU”.

.          .          .

Well, I didn’t mean to sound petty here (I know, too late for that) and I don’t resent the fact that I’m helping a multimillion dollar company sell their product—that’s why I wrote the review (and to help male customers like me, hopefully).  I just wish it didn’t feel like they were the ones doing ME the favor.  Just sayin’!