kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SMACKDOWN: The Amtrak Pants Entry okay, I decided to do this Smackdown thing courtesy of ThreeWayAction….if you want to play along, here’s the link: http://smackdown.kismet.cx/ The challenge is to write journal entries that are on a number of set topics. This particular one is described as “What problem, in your life, is heading towards a messy trainwreck….or could be? Tell us what actually happened, or the worst-case scenario you’re hoping to avoid. Okay, kids….here goes. I live two streets down from the train tracks in my town. The beauty of living in New England is that we’re too cheap to stop using something just because it’s out of fashion; we get trains through several times a day, including commuter trains to Boston, which is pretty darn cool if you ask me. But the rails are there and in use, and hence the trains through several times a day. Which tends to dance small objects off the shelves in my home if they’re too near the edge, and sufficiently light, but otherwise doesn’t affect me much. Unless, of course, I’m five minutes late getting out the door in the morning. Then I hit the Cha-Cha-Cha Train, and my day is ruined utterly. I need to leave my house by 7:30 am every morning to get to work by 8am. At 7:35, there is a train that blows through the middle of town, across the two main thoroughfares I have to cross, halting traffic while it chugs…..sloooooooowwwwwwwwwwsssssss way down….. and then, I swear to god….starts going the other way. Like the forward-back of the Charlston, done in tons of rolling steel and at just the right time to bugger up my morning commute, if I don’t make it out the door in that five minute window. That bloody train makes me completely nuts. In general, I’m rather fond of trains…. I like Big Machines, and watching them work is pretty darn cool. But to see that train blocking my dang way, and then slooooowing dooooown…. and then chugging BACKWARDS…all designed to put a 15 minute hole in my commute, which I hate anyway—is sometimes just the Last Straw. After that, my whole day is cursed. That sort of thing happens to me pretty often. And I know the size and shape of it, and know I would be lighter without it, but there you are. No, it’s not the little prickly hedgehog of the perpetually late—it’s the mistake of thinking that I’m well and truly cursed. Intellectually, I know that’s not true. There are plenty of things I could point to and say “see? That part is going really, really well.” And part of the reason I like to think of myself as a rationalist is because it lets me weight things properly, and look at my life in perspective. But then, there’s a part of me that knows it is doomed. I suppose it's more comforting to think that you're being tormented than just getting hit with random fate--you have some chance of negotiating with the former, and none with the latter. So I don't want to think that I'm cursed. Truly.... I used to feel terribly sorry for people who hit the workforce in the mid 90's, because... you know, they hit it on a high, and at least had the ride before the dotcrash. Those of us who went to work in the recession in the early 90's were basically screwed, and used to it. But that becomes wearing, all by itself. I don't want to believe I'm cursed, because eventually I know that I will just freeze there, a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for the next piano from six stories up. But you know, that gets harder every day. 10:37 p.m. - 2002-08-19 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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