Internet, this is just day one of my return to suburbia land. Already it has proven to be a most illuminating journey. I must share an important lesson with you that I learned today and it is this: Don’t ever leave the city. Actually, let me amend that. Even if you want to leave the city, THE CITY WILL NOT LET YOU. It’s like the kind of annoying boyfriend that clings to you when you least expect it. Kind of like a parasitic chewed up piece of gum on the underside of a school desk; you never know its there until you accidentally touch it. Actually, I have to admit that my analogy isn’t entirely correct. It’s not that the city doesn’t want you to leave, it just makes it exceedingly difficult to do so. So the correct analogy would really be the manipulative bastard boyfriend who hides your car key while you’re in the bathroom and then miraculously finds it after hours of fruitless searching.
But once again, I can’t place the blame squarely on the city. No, it’s also partially fault of the sinister evil force that calls itself Amtrak. Let me back up for a moment here to explain something. Usually I go home by plane but because I was a huge slacker and only started looking for tickets 2 weeks before thanksgiving, price tags on plane tickets started looking more like the price tags on the Ipod touch pre Black Friday. Now to be economical, I decided this year would be the year to try new things. Amtrak and an eight-hour train ride home couldn’t possibly be so bad right? Oh the naïveté.
I think the day just started off poorly. I woke up and it was raining. Anyone who knows anything about living in NYC will know that it is close to impossible to get a taxi when it is raining. Its like everyone in the city is the Wicked Witch of the West’s cousin or something because the minute rain starts falling from the sky, everyone is inside a taxi avoiding the rain like it’ll melt their skin off. Or give them an STD. I don’t know. In any case it was a pain in the ass just trying to get to Penn Station while juggling all of meine luggage.
Once I actually got to Penn Station though, I thought my pilgrimage would be much smoother. Internet, that was stupid thought number 2. Penn station was pandemonium. People were running around like their underwear was on invisible fire. Now I am admittedly a noob when it comes to Penn Station. I have no idea where anything is in that ungodly underworld. Now despite the somewhat negative image outside people have of New Yorkers, they are generally a friendly industrious populace. Internet, today New York had its period or something because, holy crap, everyone was snarky. Even the people who could not possibly be on their period, namely Y chromosome carriers and the elderly, were PMSing like no tomorrow. Seriously, I just wanted to yell, ALL OF YOU STOP OVULATING.
When 1:15 rolled around, I was a happy camper. It meant I was going to FINALLY get on my train to suburbia. But then at the crucial moment when we should be starting to board… over the intercom I hear, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we apologize. There will be a one hour service delay for the train with service to not New York City, NY.” My articulate response: Fuck. The retrospectively funny thing is that Amtrak never really gave us a reason for the delay, which makes me think it must be something either shady or hilarious. Maybe the train operator got drunk and they were giving him IV fluids to sober him up. Or maybe a passenger started freaking out about THE SLANTED TRAIN TRACKS AT YONKERS. (Seriously why the fuck are the train tracks at Yonkers so slanted?! Any more angled and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the train would have plunged into the water. )
Anyway, I was going to be a good sport about the delay. After all, everything from planes to parturition gets delayed and I was armed to the teeth with Nietzsche and Dan Brown. But you know who was not a good sport about the delay? The rest of Penn Station. You would think Amtrak just told everyone instead of tickets, they would require everyone’s first born child for boarding. Now I initially felt sorry for these Amtrak people….until it turned out that they were the ones ovulating the hardest. Ask them a question and you may as well have just asked for finger amputation surgery. You would think people in the service industry would have better manners but apparently, they also went to the same diplomacy school as my brain and famous alumnus Montgomery Burns.
To be continued when I am not so tired
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