Hung Out To Dry

I often get asked by people who live in Boston why I like staying out in the 'burbs and the simple answer is that I love my truck and having a vehicle of any kind in the city of Boston is a nuisance. Your options are either paying hundreds of dollars a month for the right to park your car half a mile away from the apartment you are already paying thousands of dollars for and being (at best) 70% sure no one will mess with your car during the night OR you can not have a car at all and be at the whims of public transportation. And while I like to think of myself as both a lover of humanity and the environment who can totally see how public transportation is the community coming together to try and make the air a little more breathable, the rest of me see that the main problem I have with public transportation is, in fact, the public. While many of the people who take the train into work are capable and driven people who know that the best way for this to work is for them to focus on the task at hand and make everyone's ride as easy as possible, those are never the people on my train. I get the people who don't know where they are going, how much this "fare" you speak of is and want to talk over not only their plans for the rest of the night but for the next 75 years of their family, all while standing in my way. Confronted with dealing with those people or some traffic, the choice seems fairly easy to me.

Still, sometimes the occasional ride on the train can't be avoided and on Saturday I found myself in that situation. But even though my trips on the MBTA are not very frequent I still ride it enough to know what I am doing and I don't try and blend in as best I can when I am on the train, which means trying to inconvenience the rest of humanity as little as possible. In fact, I am so conscientious I will usually inconvenience myself just so that a total stranger doesn't have to do any extra work and comes away from our exchange thinking I'm an asshole. While I don't expect everyone else around me to engage in similarly strange behavior, I do think the world would work a little more smoothly if we all stopped to consider how our actions would impact those around us and proceed accordingly. That is why I can never understand those people who seem to go out of their way to place their needs in front of the rest of society. I can understand the theory that if you don't look out for yourself no one else will, but somewhere along the line you should also realize the world doesn't revolve around you (sadly college kids appear to be the last people to learn this lesson and I live in a city where there are 50 colleges in a ten-block radius). And that lesson should apply double when you are in a public setting.

In a previous post I wrote about how annoyed I get at the people who think the world is theirs and we're lucky to be living in it. I think at the time the main example I used were the people who took off their shoes and spread out on the couches in Gillette Stadium's Fidelity Clubhouses like they were in their living rooms. Well, this weekend I got an even better example as I encountered a man who decided a Green Line Trolley was a convenient place to treat as his own personal dry cleaners. The kid in question had decided to stand back in one of the corners of the trolley so he could sulk like a child who didn't want to be going to a family function, but then hung a dress shirt on one of the handle bars in front of him, which people had to then step around. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when he quickly grabbed one of the open seats and moved his laundry with him, only now it was swaying around the stairs in the middle of the train, which means he actually found an even more inconvenient place than he already had. What was even weirder was that everyone on the train was respecting the sanctity of the shirt and no one asked him to take it off the bar and hold it so someone else could grab the bar there. Of course, this left me full of questions: where was he going that he needed this one dress shirt? Why wasn't he just wearing it? If it was so important, why didn't he put the little dry cleaners bag around the shirt? Lastly, who did he think he was to use value space on public transportation on a Saturday afternoon to hang up his laundry?

I didn't ask him any of these questions because that would just spoil the mystery and I was having too much fun coming up with possible back stories about this person ranging from the absurd (he likes to air-dry his shirts in public places to get the authentic smell of the city) to the more plausible (he had to work tomorrow, was staying at a friend's that night and that friend didn't have an iron so he ironed his shirt at home and didn't want to wrinkle it). And while I had visions of slyly cutting off a button or discreetly grabbing a pen to draw something on the arm to teach the kid a lesson about respecting other people's space, obviously I did none of those things (again, desperately trying not to be an asshole). Plus, the biggest problem with people who do things like this is that they are completely oblivious to why their actions would be annoying to other people, so explaining to this kid why he may have been irritating the woman whose face the arm on his shirt kept swinging into or that just because he spent $2.50 for the ride into the city that doesn't mean he now owns the train would have been a waste of time for everyone involved. You can only hope that before too long he learns it on his own but until he and people like him do I'll stick to my truck as much as possible. But  don't get me wrong, I still need public transportation to exist because that assures me that if someone is annoying me in my car I still have the option of dropping them off somewhere and making them take the train home.