blistering

Riding the Subway in New York city can be the greatest feeling and most daunting experience that the city has to offer – next to the Staten Island ferry.   You can find all sorts of people traveling together in unison, sort of how the Olympic games is an example of the world playing together.  The New York city subway is how we all work together.  A cohort of mine made an astute observation about how there are certain rules that are understood and even implemented a little better by a select few that would not go anywhere else.

For instance:
Subway platform staring.  There is an etiquette to this that is not very easy to manage.  You cannot ogle someone that you are interested in, but the method in which you are to acknowledge them on a crowded platform has a barometer of how intrusive it is.   There is also a way of dismissing the ogling so that you can be at least a bit more comfortable around thirty people who are pretending that you do not exist. School kids are good at this.

Other things include your proximity to a person. You are guaranteed a least ten minutes a day – if not all at the same time -  of a person’s face directly in front of yours while you’re painfully looking at advertisements.  Aside from that are the people who talk needlessly loud almost in order to deter the fact that there are seventy people that they don’t know surrounding them.  Most of the time the conversation has to do with their destination, as that is one of the few personal things that you can speak about on the train and not be too obnoxious.

There are things to watch out for on the subway too.  You should never stand too close to the guy who just bought a magazine that he can’t read in plain view from one of those stands on the platform.  Another thing are the dudes looking about as if they need directions but start walking toward you when you get closer to them.  If you keep a straight face and look forward they won’t ask you for change.  Keeping their gaze just warrants a long story about how they are trying to catch a bus.  They’re going to be two stops down the line tomorrow with the same twelve dollar request.

There is little compassion that is dispensable on a subway car.  Think about it, we’re all too broke to afford a car.  And those with cars can only drive them on the weekends because they can’t afford gas.  The reality that we live when we take the subway is one where all turns are dark, and most of our options have been exhausted.  We’re coming home from having an amazing dinner.  It might have even been free.  We still have to pay for a way home and we are completely alone in the matter.  However in our loneliness we are together and you can see all shades of the global community in commute with each other no matter the subway line or the circumstances of our individual lives.

There is also comfort in knowing that no one wants to speak to you.  In most other situations during the day you are forced to say things that you’d rather not, or were just thinking, or that had no place in the conversation.  There is something admirable in the way that each of us without the company of others embark on our musical, or silent, teleportation  to the situations of our lives.

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