Thursday's revelations

Two things I learned today:

1. One should avoid riding the bus across town from Berkeley to Oakland during mid afternoon if at all possible, esp. if you are in a hurry. During these precise hours, between 1pm and 3:30pm, a masssive influx of the maimed, aged, blind, smelly, mobility challenged, nursing mothers with enormous strollers, people in wheelchairs, and generally testy people flock to our cities' buses in a free for all.

Don't think I am picking on the marginalized. I'm not. I've been a bus rider all my damn life, in some pretty tough places at that. I know what kinds of messed up stuff happens on the bus. I simply hypothesize that during said peak hours, there are more marginalized on the bus then at any other time.

The resulting delays are beyond simple tally counts. The accompanying smell is even more discouraging.

I board at 2:14 pm.

At 2:18 pm the bus stops to pick up a man with a walker at 51st and Broadway in Oakland. The hydraulic lift lowered and delivered him to the main cabin of the bus (taking at least 2 minutes, but who's counting). A woman sitting there with her enormous stroller and baby unit also happened to be in this main cabin area. As soon as he was free from the lift, the man in the walker immediately began to scold her for taking up seating designated for people such as himself (see above, or old, testy, mobility challenged, etc.). The mother fooolishly decided to ignore him. With the speed of a threatened sloth, he rolled up to her and begins to push the stroller to the side with his walker's wheel set, nudging it between two seats. Then all hell broke loose - with the old man ranting something about seniors' rights.

At this point, everyone on the bus is wondering if the mother is going to bust grandpa on his ass. Luckilly, fate intervened. Bus pulls over, driver enters cabin, rightfully annoyed, and proceeds to forcefully direct the old timer into an empty seat (which was right in front of him, of course.) Old timer murmurs something about "no respect for seniors", etc. We shake our heads.

2. The second thing I learned today is that I am engaging in activities of late I always said I would not do. For example, instead of correctly dicing up and skinning an avocado, I am beginning to just cut it in half and eat it out of the shell (salted) with a spoon (that sounds gross...). It must be out of laziness. The other things I am doing are ignoring my bills until two days before they are due, turning in late rough drafts, and letting other people pick up my slack in studio.

All these things make me feel like altogether a bad person, but I like to think of it as a temporary digression.

3. Lastly, I am not managing my money very well.