i heart the subway

I am among the minority of people who do not listen to some sort of ipod or other music player on the subway, and instead I usually just sort of people watch. After more than 7 months of regular ridership I can definitely say I'm only more enamored of the people and events of the New York Subway. In fact, although I rarely even have conversations with the people on the subway, it's rare that I go 2 days without falling in love with a fellow passenger. Here are a sampling of stories from the couple of weeks. (perhaps the next post will be about taxis and the cab driver who fed me guava)

1. Gang Warfare of the anti-inflammatory variety.
Bed-Stuy is a pretty rough place, and right now there's an underground war as fierce as crips/bloods or biggie/tupac ever was. It's apparently a war of the headache medicines. The makers of Tylenol have plastered the Franklin Ave stop (my stop) with giant posters advertising their particular brand of pain reliever. Not to be outdone, some hooligan or young scamp has defaced each and every poster, scribbling out TYLENOL and writing over it in big black marker: BAYER!
This kind of escalation can only lead to something bad. Next thing you know somebody will be in front of our elementary schools slinging Advil (sugar-coated!) Luckily my "Rite-Aid Acetaminophen" was hidden carefully in my purse or who knows what might have gone down.

2. Like Retarded Retarded. (and $4 to anyone who can name the movie reference).
Today, I was riding the train as it pulled up to Jay Street and I saw a man waiting to get on who clearly had down syndrome. He was unaccompanied and looked just like all the other riders, jacket, backpack, headphones. For some reason I was struck by his confidence and self-assurance, striding onto the train, taking the good seat, getting out his headphones to start listening to music. My mind started wandering and I thought "huh. I wonder if this is normal or if he's just particularly advanced." I remembered Corky's girlfriend on Life Goes On (yeah I'm an asshole) had a drivers license so maybe this type of independence is totally normal and I'm just out of the loop. Then I realized that his headphones were tangled up. He sat there and slowly and methodically tried to untangle the cord but just kept getting them more tangled. This went on for many many torturous minutes and once in awhile he'd sigh loudly, put the headphones down, and just hold his face in his hands for a few seconds. Then, he'd start up again. He worked on the headphones from Jay street all the way to Spring street, a good 14 minutes of subway riding. I was in agony. I wanted to rip them out of his hands, fix them (it was easy to tell how they could be untangled), hand them back, and be done with the mess. You could tell he was in agony too. Eventually I noticed I wasn't the only one watching, there were at least 3-4 of us on the edge of our seats, trying to decide whether to help, hoping he'd finally just fix the damn things. We all wanted to cry.

Then... Success! suddenly, the knots magically untangled. The man put the headphones on and instantly his face went from deep concentration and frustration to pure joy.

3. Last week I got my leg caught in the train door. It took 4 people to pry the door open to free me. That's all you get.