This guy...

...was a total mess. We went out to dinner with friends in SF on Friday night and got on the 11pm train to head home. When we got on the train, he was going after this burrito. (He could have been filming one of those terrible Carls Jr. commercials). Then, all that frenetic energy swiftly left him and he promptly passed out. As he slumped over to the side, his hand barely kept a grip on his burrito. You can't see it in this photo, but he had burrito juice running down his pants leg. There were wrapper pieces and rice particles sprinkling the seat next to him. At one point, a girl walked over to him to wake him up and ask him what stop he needed. He replied "huh? Oh, the next stop." She then asked him if he knew which one that was and he confirmed that he did. Then he passed out again. He finally got off three stops later. We reached the stop and he bolted up and stumbled, almost horizontally, out the doors. I really hope he took a cab or walked home.

I'm so fired

I just was reviewing my neglected blog and noticed the sidebar where I ask you to send me your stories.  At which point I realized I haven't checked that email in forever.  As Murphy would have it, a friend of mine had shared a story with me.  On March 30.  So sorry, I wasn't ignoring you!!!!  Here it is and thank you for sharing!  You're right M., BART is so disconcerting.

Hi Christy,

I'm enjoying your BART stories and have one of my own.

After 30+ years of backpacking, I pride myself on my sense of direction. That feeling though was shot to hell on my one and only BART ride about 2 years ago.I visited my daughter in her first year at Berkeley and we took the BART to SF so she could visit a dance studio she was interested in. The ride over, or rather under the bay, was uneventful, except for the fact I couldn't stop trying to estimate the tons of weight pushing down on the car I was in.

The ride back though had me totally confused. We walked down the stairs and got in the car and for nearly the entire ride back to Berkeley I was convinced the train was moving in the wrong direction. Watching the lights and the wall move past the window, I would have bet (and lost) big money that we were going the wrong way. It wasn't until we had traveled some distance and I started to recognize the stations we had passed traveling west that I finally relaxed. If I could only have seen the sun, I would have been OK.

M.S.

Protests in the Air

 There's an electric air in San Francisco lately.  Between fighter jets flying overhead every half hour (Fleet Week) to hundreds of protesters lining up outside banks (#OccupySF) throughout the financial district lately, there's a lot going on.  On many afternoons, we've been able to hear protesters from our office window.   Apparently, the air of protest is contagious (or maybe it's just San Francisco).  There's a Church of Scientology a block up from work.  The doors are very rarely open, so I was a little surprised when I walked past on my lunch break to see people in front of it.

I was even more surprised when I noticed these people were holding signs and wearing masks.  Upon closer inspection, you could see that they were wearing CREEPY masks.  Then, one of the protesters grabbed a boom box and this is what I heard:  <this song>

That's right, the Church of Scientology got rick-rolled.  Awesome.

 

This seems like a good note on which to return to blogging

I want her self-confidence

Recipe for Amazing Awfulness: 

Combine:

• 1 stand-up bass
• 1 kazoo
• 1 tamborine
• 1 severely off-key voice 
• 1 lacy dress
• 1 pair of Vans from the 90s

Directions:

• Find and put on semi-dressy dress.   Make sure it shows some cleavage.
• Put on low-rise socks with Vans shoes.  Take tamborine, attach to right shoe. 
• Take kazoo.  Either place in mouth to play or in cleavage for holding.
• Take popular songs (i.e. "House of the Rising Sun" and "Walk the Line") and distort them so that they're virtually unrecognizable. 

 What you get:

People will be awestruck and scared, yet entertained.

Chipozzle

This couple sitting behind me on BART today were discussing burritos. The guy was trying to show his girlfriend how big Chipotle burritos were. Her response: "How should I know how big the burritos there are? I've never eaten ay Chip--, Chip---, Chipo--, Chipozzle! Those sound like they could be shared by two people"

Him: "Well, yeah, they could be shared, but you could eat an entire one. I like your 'tender bits' ".

At this point, he pinched her love handles.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? That it sounds like there's something off with this guy?

She then asked him about the sodas there. He mentioned they were okay, but not as good as "that place" with the good pure cane sugar sodas. He explained to her that the Illuminati shut the other place down and told them that they were required to serve the "poisonous other stuff."

That's not it. When we exited the Transbay tunnel, he cried out when he saw the smog against the hills. He explained to her that it was "radioactive dust." He believed that they should invest in a geiger counter to measure Uranium levels. She agreed (earnestly) that they ought to.

I love listening to some good conspiracy theories on my BART ride home!

Wrong side of the Bed

Last week, I needed to get blood drawn before work, so I took the early BART train to the Powell Street station.  While I was walking through the Powell Street station, I noticed five police officers and a stretcher.  What was going on!?  I then heard someone screaming very loudly.  As I approached the exit, I saw a homeless man who had passed out on the floor of the BART station.  He was obviously very inebriated, because as they tried to wake him up, he started screaming.  Three of the five officers stood there chit-chatting while two tried to get the man to wake up (apparently this was not an unusual circumstance for them!).  The officers were very gentle (they weren't even touching him) but you would have thought they were manhandling him from his wailing.

It instantly reminded me of one Sunday afternoon when Mike and I ate lunch in Morro Bay.  As we returned to our car, a homeless man stopped us to pet our dogs and after a few minutes of conversation, he suddenly switched gears and began having flashbacks to Vietnam.  It was SO sad and scary for him, and lucky for him my husband, who is SO good in moments of crisis, was there to help him find a place to sit until he came out of it.  Then he started sobbing.  It was heartbreaking.

AC Transit is not my friend

On Saturday night, I had a great time partying it up in San Francisco for my friend's 30th birthday. We all crashed in a hotel room in Union Square. Whenever I drink, I don't sleep much so it was no surprise to me when my internal alarm clock went off at 6:15 am. Knowing that normal people sleep longer after a night of drinking, I decided to sneak out and go home early. My phone had died the night before, so I was unable to check the BART schedule, but I always take early trains during the week, so I figured I was good to go. I walked over to the BART and got on the Pitsburg/Bay Point train, figuring I'd transfer at 19th Street Oakland (my standard route home).

Of all the days for my phone (and thus my camera) to be dead! I was smashed into a train chock-full of Bay to Breakers. There were some good costumes but (thankfully) no naked guys. They all got off at the Embarcadero stop and soon it was just five of us on the train.

Since my phone was dead, I had nothing to do but sit and eavesdrop on the couple across the aisle. I'm using the term couple very loosely, as it was actually a guy hitting on the stranger in front of him. It amazes me how some guys don't pick up on body language or social cues! She was sitting in front of him. His pick-up line was "Do you speak spanish?" (the answer: "Even though I look mexican, no.". Neither did he. Then he started with what can best be described as an interview. Where was she taking BART to? Was she in school? Where did she work? If this seems creepy to you, it was! Initially, she turned around to answer his questions but soon she just stared straight ahead and answered them as he stared at her reflection in the BART window. To her credit, she gave vague answers that wouldn't give him a chance to stalk her later. I wanted to yell out to her that if she was uncomfortable, she had every right to a) stop engaging in the interrogation or b) move. Sadly, the uncomfort continued until I reached my transfer at 19th Street.

I got off the BART and walked to the opposite platform. Funny, there was no train scheduled to arrive. Weird. An elderly lady approached me and asked me if the Richmind train was coming. My only answer: "I hope." I found a schedule on the board and learned that Sunday morning trains don't start running until 8:15 am. It was 7:15 am. The only reason the other train was running was due to a special schedule for Bay to Breakers.

Dammit. I had nothing to read or listen to (damn  dead phone!).  I was not in the best (or worst) part of Oakland. Nothing would be open, anyway, because it was too early on a Sunday morning. I found the older lady and let her know the news. She asked me how much the bus would cost. Light bulb! I could take the bus home!

I went upstairs and just my luck, the bus I needed drove up right then! Score, right? No. The damn bus died every time it opened its doors. Which is every stop. We'd sit there for five minutes at every stop as the driver fiddled with the buttons and tried to get the engine to turn over. Then it would start (hooray!) and we'd drive a mile to the next stop and it would die. I was pleading with the bus gods to let the bus make it to Berkeley, where I could at least hang out at a familiar coffee shop until BART started running. Somewhere near Ashby, the bus stopped dying at each stop, but only with the trade-off of listening to an incessant warning buzz the entire ride home.

When I finally got home, my two sweet dogs were so excited to see me. I can't remember a recent time when I was so happy to see them, too.