It’s always a drag on the subway. Even when you manage to get a seat and you’ve got a long ride, you can’t quite go to sleep because you might miss your stop. You just kind of drift… waiting… I never seem to have reading material. I think that’s the key.
I had fun taking this photo. It was pretty crowded. I had a 28mm lens on the camera. It was resting on my bag and totally in this guy’s face.
I watched a guy a bit earlier in the day obnoxiously taking a million photos with his big digital camera of this old guy. Shoot, look at screen, shoot, look at screen. On and on this went. Everybody was staring. Hope he got a good picture.
I hate riding alone on subways, trains, planes, buses and public whatever for just the reason you outlined. Although I can fall asleep at work in my car and somehow always magically wake up right when my lunch break is over. If that would only work on public transport. As for that otro’ dude with the digicam, I hope he got his pic too.
…and SO MANY long plane/train/bus rides back and forth from “U of E” for 6 years… no mater how enjoyable the time there the trips back and forth must have been soooooo lonely.
I don’t know. Except for the long waits for an overdue bus or train, I kind of like public transportation. To me riding in such vehicles evokes the transient halcyon state sought after by the designer of the “ideal elevator” in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.
As a traveler I’m always aware that eventually the journey will end and the waveform of “dragon not at starting point or destination” will collapse into one of the possible outcomes (ie. “vehicle reaches destination” or “vehicle turns around and returns home” or “vehicle breaks down, dragon stranded”) and that I will have to consider all those possibilities more and more as the drive progresses. However, when I am a passenger rather than the director of the vehicle then the choices are further out of my hands and rather than dwell on the many potential ground-states I might need to deal with, I can instead revel in the uncertain now, knowing that persons other than me will be making the decisions up until my point of departure from the vehicle. The sort of trusting ignorant bliss that Schrödinger’s cat must feel as it waits in it’s box with the hydrocyanic acid flask and hammer.
Or maybe I prefer public transportation because I grew up largely in the countryside so driving was often relatively unobstructed and direct. Whereas when I came to the city I got amped with road rage from sitting in congested traffic for so long, not to mention the nightmare of trying to find parking that didn’t cost an arm and a leg (or in some cases any parking at all). Plus there were the constant repairs, taxes, and insurance to worry about.
When I got married and gave up the car it was a load off my mind.
Of course I usually have reading material as well, so maybe that’s really the main contributing factor to my mood on the commute.