Much Ado About Nothing
It is 6PM. I am waiting for the 2-3, but I settle for the 1-9. I want to get home as quickly as possible.
A man passes me on the platform, giving me the eye, the once over, twice. He is sweaty and I can see through his shirt that he has those puffy 3D areola like pubescent girls have. If it was an unflattering leer before, it is downright insulting when you add in puffy areola.
In Penn Station, someone is playing the Sounds of Silence on panpipes for money. As annoying as that song is when played in its usual manner, the addition of panpipes practically makes patchouli waft out of the AC system.
The large schedule rack in the Central Corridor is a good resting spot for my Schwepp's seltzer water. I begin tapping on my Blackberry, adding words to this entry in the off chance I ever care to hear my own account of this moment again. A man approaches me. He is too tan and too old to be flattering. He begins asking me questions about the Blackberry. Does it have Nextel? Can you surf the Web with it? I look down at his badge. He is Ted Dickerson. He works “in security” for Morgan Stanley. By his attire I can tell he installs alarms or something. I think, why on Earth wouldn't you lie completely, instead of just moderately disguise your career? He is dropping numbers now. 3 million dollars. A quarter of a million dollars. He talks and talks. More and more people walk past us. I have to cut him off in mid-sentence to catch my train. I missed the announcement. I hurry down the stairs and Ted Dickerson follows me. He sits directly behind me. I keep tapping, tapping this right now, so he won't keep talking to me.
Lisa had to go into work tonight, so we put our plans off again. She feels badly about this. Truthfully, I wouldn't have been great company tonight. My stomach is having a full-blown prison riot about the samosas I had at lunch. I can't figure out how peas and potatoes could subject me to this.
In California, no one had to interact in the post-work hours unless it was their choice to do so. But here in New York, I sit among the bank managers and secretaries and alarm installers whether I want to or not. In California, everyone drove their own car to work. I never had to see anyone sleeping or drinking beer from a paper bag or changing a fucking diaper. It's too crowded, too intimate.
The brouhaha at my work has escalated. A line has been drawn in the sand that dares anyone to be foolish enough to cross it. In hushed meetings, my boss K, myself and a third employee J speak in low voices about the state of the department. I act as though I am part of the team here. I try to agree without actually agreeing.
While they are talking I figure out I can reset the adult content filter on my email so it doesn't dump my friends' messages in the porn dead letter box. It searches for words such as fuck or cock and then removes them from the innocent eyes of the recipient. This strikes me as ironic since everyone I encounter uses “fuck” on a daily basis. Cab drivers, coworkers and the little man at the bagel cart all say fuck. Although I have no evidence to support it, I suspect at least some churches in New York deliver the Rosary as “Hail Mary, full of fucking grace...”
I look at the degrees of filtering I can choose and turn it off completely. This will make my life much easier, as my messages will reach me as soon as they are sent. Lisa's mail always gets exiled into the porn bin. She has some kind of electronic reputation as a potty mouth among e-mail servers. Even her non-swearing e-mails are sometimes confiscated. When I explained the system to her, she said, “Well, the e-mail filter is right. My content is ALL adult.”
It's 7:28 now and I'm finally home. I can hear one of the cats retching in another room. I ignore this and go in to kiss Monkey hello.
Immediately prior to this entry, is a Friends Only post. So log in if you wish to read it. And Lisa, now you gotta sign up on Live Journal. No more lurking like a pedophile jangling candy in your pocket at the playground!
This entry was written yesterday after work on my Blackberry, but I was too tired to post it then. I have since rewritten portions of it, so back dating it would have been cheating. I have also managed to find the setting that was preventing my Live Journal cookies from being accepted and change it, so I can edit entries from home now. Oh happy day!