I am checking to see if this thing is still alive.

And if you can see this, it is.

We'll see if that information becomes useful.

If I knew the tunes I might join in.

This morning I learned that the guy across the aisle from me was headed to DC to talk to a lawyer about his uncle's will. His uncle died two months ago, and he's the next of kin, but the lawyer had been unable to find him for a while. The guy's own immediate family has all died (which I thought was really sad given that he couldn't be over 60 - he's lost both sons, his wife, and his two dogs). He is praying that his uncle left him property in DC so he can leave Baltimore, maybe spend his days fixing up a house he can live in. He's nervous that his uncle left him nothing and that he's gotten his hopes up and spent money on train fare for nothing, that he'll come back disappointed.

I learned all this before the train even pulled out of Penn Station. I got on the train four minutes before it pulled out.

After he told me about his dogs, he retreated from the conversation looking pensive. I checked my email, called a friend who was having a bad morning to leave a message that I was thinking about him, and opened my book. I thought about the lady on the train a few months ago who spilled the tale of her husband's infidelity to the guy across from her and how I thought, at the time, that it was sad that she had no one else to talk to... that she was so lonely that she would just tell that extremely intimate story of pain and love and sex and mental illness to a total stranger. I thought about a guy on the Metro last week who told his seatmate about his doctor misdiagnosing him and putting him on the wrong psychiatric drug and how my immediate reaction was a cringing "oh shit, this guy is so lonely and he's making himself so vulnerable to this person he just met." I wondered who the guy across from me today talks to when he's not on the train. I thanked something or other for friends I can reach out to when I'm worried. I reminded myself to be that friend for them, too.

But then I thought about it again, and I don't remember exactly why - I was reading the first chapter of "Unconditional Parenting" at the time, maybe I just have loving human interactions on the brain - and I came away thinking that maybe my initial analysis had more to do with how I have been thinking about love than with these two talkative people on the train. I have been thinking it's a tragedy to have to share worry and fear and loss with strangers... and while I am still thankful that I have friends to share mine with, and I still wish that everyone had friends to share that stuff with, maybe connecting with the person across from the aisle in a brief but intense moment - just saying what's on your mind, honestly, maybe just because the person's got a receptive smile and looked you in the eye and you needed to get it out - maybe that's not tragic at all.

Maybe the guy across the aisle today has a best friend he talks to every day; maybe he's got a lover or a coworker or a next-door neighbor he tells everything to; maybe he just had a whole lot of everything today and needed another person in his life - another friend just for a few minutes. Who knows what the deal is - perhaps he only ever talks to people on trains and that works for him. I think the lesson for me, today, needs to be about me and not about him, you know?

Sometimes spending all of your waking life in DC means needing a reminder that humanity and love and trust don't have to be classified, compartmentalized, and carefully rationed. And that fully exercising your humanity - just... expressing emotion in the moment you're feeling it - doesn't have to be a sign of loneliness or pathology. Maybe it just means you're a person.

Pack up, but don't stray. (Blogging live from Pittsburgh, PA!)

You knew it was bound to happen, right? As soon as the words "I haven't hated anyone all week" escaped my fingers?

Fucking Mapquest! GOD!

Actually, that's about the extent of it, though. I just can't even muster a good rant right now, even about how Mapquest sucks and caused me to get lost in an unfamiliar city. Because despite having had to stop and ask for directions (which just, no - I hate doing that), I am still freakishly happy. And Pittsburgh is so awesome that it's hard to be in a bad mood, or even a snit, really, here. Plus, completely free wireless in my hotel room, so.

Ruby on fireflies, Thursday night: "That firefly lit up his butt so we could see where we're going. That was nice of him."

My only comfort is the night gone black.

I've been in an almost alarmingly good mood this week, which explains (and may also be, like a happy spiral of yay, in small part due to) my disappearance from all my usual e-haunts. And apparently I've been telegraphing that in some way to the tourists, perhaps in the lack of passive-aggressive sighing as I try to maneuver around the sidewalk-width packs they're always traveling in, because I haven't left my office for lunch once this week without being asked for directions. And, bizarrely, I have given them with a smile. I don't know what's happening to me. I feel it'd reasonable to look in the mirror tomorrow and find out that I'm plaid, or made of corduroy, or something.

This has all made me hyperaware of Metro's dire signage problem. Twice in the last 24 hours, I've been asked, "Where is the Metro?" while standing literally in front of Metro stations. And because I'm in such a charitable mood, I actually feel bad saying, "Right here!" So I try to do it brightly and cheerily, and without adding even a silent "UM..." on either end. There's only so much good mood to go around. I don't want to take more than my fair share at the expense of the tourists. Scarcity, don't you know.

I haven't hated anyone all week long. I don't know how sustainable this is in terms of keeping a blog. I will try to balance my mental health with your entertainment.

And oh how she prays to find a man to blame for every loveless night she waits.

I really have to replace my deceased iPod, Hazel. Because when I don't have something in my ears, I have to hear men on the train talk about how they've physically assaulted their 15-year-old daughters for kissing boys and told them "if you want to be a ho, do it on your own time, not when you live here," and "make it hard, but don't make it easy." (It took me a minute, but the putrescent, nauseating, fully horrifying meaning of that did sink in, and then the pesky laws of the state of Maryland kept me from choking the life out of him.)

Sad.

Oh, and there was this other sad-but-for-different-reasons conversation I heard on Friday night. Responding to a casual, "So, are you retired?" from her seatmate, whom she'd just met, the woman across from me said, "Yeah. I got sick. I had a nervous breakdown. [Seatmate: 'Oh.'] My husband cheated on me with another woman, and it just hurt me so much I couldn't even drive. [Seatmate: 'Oh.'] But I divorced him, though. She can have him! [Seatmate: 'Heh!']" She had so clearly been waiting to tell someone, anyone, that story. Because either it hurts so much and so constantly, still, that it's always right there ready to spill out of her on to anyone who gives it an opening, or she's so lonely that she doesn't have anyone to talk to about it. In either case, I kind of hate her ex.

Before Hazel died, though, I only really ever used her to torment myself with equally sad and even more personally heartbreaking lyrics while lamenting my own dramas and losses, so maybe I needn't spend the extra money. I could perhaps just bring a little xylophone on the train and set these tales of tragedy to music.

Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.

My feet are still so raw from the sand at Jensen Beach, which is made entirely of shells. Even my flattest, least fancy shoes are really painful. I think I'm going to wrap my feet in 100 layers of cotton balls. (My brain could use some too - my feet aren't the only parts of me that feel raw this week. I've been having a really exciting and difficult exchange with someone that feels both like excising a wound and like a million pounds of aching lifted off my heart.)

So. A commuting anecdote:

Last night as I was making my way back to my car on the Green Line, I apparently angered a kid (maybe 17-ish?) sitting too far away from me for me to have any idea what I could have done to him. As he was getting off the train he began first muttering and then just outright saying mean shit at me. It was strange... not that people being randomly abusive on the Metro is all that unusual. But normally, when you hear someone shouting random abuse at people, you can count on looking up to see a person who is clearly in some kind of identifiable mental distress, you know? (I'm trying to choose my words carefully here so as not to be offensive, and I'm also only speaking of my personal experiences and not generalizing the entirety of the mentally ill population of DC or anywhere else.) This kid didn't fit the picture I'd conjured upon hearing him shouting (I don't know whether it was at me at that point) earlier in the trip.

Anyway, I decided that whether he appeared unhinged or not, it's certainly not an indication that all is well in one's head to begin harrassing a stranger unprovoked. I've witnessed teenage boys in groups say mean things to lone (usually) girls before, usually after unsuccessfully trying to get their attention by saying sexually aggressive things, but I've never seen a lone teenage boy start yelling at a grown woman before with seemingly no provocation. (Which is not to say that I think girls or women ignoring sexual comments directed at them should be deemed some kind of provocation that would excuse or even explain boys or men amping it up to insults - I further don't think that catcalling anyone is acceptable behavior in the first place.)

As I was trying to decide whether to engage this kid, I thought that he either didn't even think about the possibility that he would anger the other passengers, or he considered that and didn't care what that might mean, and either one of those, to me, was an indication that this was not someone I wanted to engage. Because that seems to me like a pretty obvious consideration and one that should stop a functional person from abusing a stranger in public. So I just kept reading and pretended I didn't even know he was there. But it might have been interesting, if I'd felt more certain that the other passengers would prevent him from choking me or something, to just calmly ask him why he was insulting me. However, given that all of this happened in my favorite city to distrust, I didn't feel assured of that in the slightest.

I was back on the MARC this morning and observed that there is an in crowd developing on the train. I think I will never escape the in crowd or that very tiny sense of "HEY!" I experience about not being in it. Watch me spend all day wondering what's wrong with me that a bunch of women twice my age with near-beehives who probably voted for Ehrlich if not Bush himself don't want me to be part of their clique. I am way well-adjusted.

You're something beautiful, a contradiction.

I commuted all the way to Florida last week. Observation: MARC is a lot more spacious than an airplane. Another observation: red lights in South Florida are approximately 783% longer than anywhere else on Earth. Seriously. You could completely forget why you were in your car at all in the time it takes a light to change down there.

I have a lot on my mind again today. Putting a whole lot of Burnekos in one spot for a week will generate some thinking. I talked (too briefly) with my uncle Guy about class identity. Later (and today, still) I tried to process my thoughts on the matter from their usual form - something like an ambrosia salad - into bite-sized question nuggets. I think I came up with some good stuff, but then I spent two days at the beach and baked my brain. And also marinated it in the darkest rum I've ever seen. The stuff'll come back to me if it was indeed worth saving.

Ruby took to calling everyone "bucko" instead of "buddy" during our trip. Nothing more to say about that; I think it stands alone as an item of interest.

During my return to work today, our esteemed president spoke to the Chamber of Commerce and went on and fucking on (I was stuck in the traffic created by both his speech and a police chase) about how learning to speak and write English is so important to being successful in the United States. I'm sure I don't need to address the question that is begged here.

Okay, now I've run out of thoughts I'm ready to share but am still writing to avoid driving myself crazy with the ones I'm not ready to share. How 'bout that local sports team?