Women are Bad Drivers (And How this Translates to the Subway)

Sorry to generalize here ladies, but you know how you all have a bad wrap for being bad drivers?  Well, the same applies in many cases to the subway.  It’s not your fault. It’s embedded in your DNA.  And I suspect that the very same innate force that causes you to [very]abruptly stop while walking down a crowded street when some fabulous shoe in the window catches your eye is the culprit.

The thing is, you ladies get kind of distracted when you’re out and about in the city. The crowd creates a mental fog of war or something.  And of course, you must always tread lightly while wearing heals. 

These issues can cause problems for men like me on my way to work and back home. These two annoying examples happened tonight - and happen all the time:

1. Ladies walk really, really slow down the stairs… through the turnstiles… on crowded platforms… and the streets… often they have a perplexed look on their face or step to their gait, like “where am I?”  Today I literally had to bark at a woman who I was trapped behind trying to get out of my home station after a long angry day’s work. “HELLO!”  I had to yell at the back of her head. Like, wake up and move lady!

2) Ladies walk really, really slow up and down the stairs but at the same time hate walking directly behind other slow women.  You know what I’m talking about.  Either way, this phenomenon, in turn, creates havoc when inevitably two slow women end up blocking both lanes of traffic…. Honey, if you’re not going to walk faster than the woman on front of you, please just walk behind her, no matter how much subconscious pain and irrational female jealously it might provoke in you.

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I’m back, baby

I think blogging kind of sucks

So I’ve been thinking about throwing in the towel.  Yes, The Angry Subway Guy is having an existential crisis.  I told a pal of mine I was thinking about ending this thing… about the valuelessnesss, wastefulness and vanity of most blogs in general (including this shit)… and dug up this story — one of the rare few — that has left an imprint on my brain and shaped my worldview (read: life).

As it turns out, my memory ain’t bad at all…and the proof of how significant this article was to me is that it was actually – shockingly — written more than 5 years ago… I was able to find it by typing the title perfectly accurately into Google -”Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again.”… It’s from the NY Times, circa Sept 2002…. Think. Reflect. Enjoy Yourself.

September 28, 2002

Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them — and that they should write it. As the author of 14 books, with a 15th to be published next spring, I’d like to use this space to do what I can to discourage them.Before I had first done so, writing a book seemed a fine, even grand thing. And so it still seems — except, truth to tell, it is a lot better to have written a book than to actually be writing one. Without attempting to overdo the drama of the difficulty of writing, to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one worked instead at bricklaying.

Why should so many people think they can write a book, especially at a time when so many people who actually do write books turn out not really to have a book in them — or at least not one that many other people can be made to care about? Something on the order of 80,000 books get published in America every year, most of them not needed, not wanted, not in any way remotely necessary.

I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, ”I can do at least as well as that”? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?

Beyond the obvious motivation for wanting to write a book — hoping to win fame or fortune — my guess is that many people who feel they have a book ”in them” doubtless see writing it as a way of establishing their own significance. ”There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart,” wrote Samuel Johnson, ”a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself.” What better way to put that distinction on display than in a book?

The search for personal significance was once nicely taken care of by the drama that religion supplied. This drama, which lived in every human breast, no matter what one’s social class, was that of salvation: Would one achieve heaven or not? Now that it is gone from so many lives, in place of salvation we have the search for significance, a much trickier business. If only oblivion awaits, how does one leave behind evidence that one lived? How will one’s distant progeny know that one once walked the earth? A book, the balmy thought must be: I shall write a book.

Forgive me if I suggest that this isn’t the most felicitous way to do battle against oblivion. Writing a book is likely, through the quickness and completeness with which one’s book will die, to make the notion of oblivion all the more vivid.

There is something very American in the notion that almost everyone has a book in him or her. (In the survey of 1,006 Americans, sponsored by a small Michigan publisher, almost equal numbers of people said they wanted to write a novel, a nonfiction work, a self-help book or a cookbook.) Certainly, it is a democratic notion, suggesting that everybody is as good as everybody else — and, by extension, one person’s story or wisdom is as interesting as the next’s. Then there is the equally false notion of creativity that has been instilled in students for too many years. It was Paul Valéry who said that the word ”creation” has been so overused that even God must be embarrassed to have it attributed to him.

Misjudging one’s ability to knock out a book can only be a serious and time-consuming mistake. Save the typing, save the trees, save the high tax on your own vanity. Don’t write that book, my advice is, don’t even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.

Joseph Epstein teaches at Northwestern University and is the author, most recently, of ”Snobbery.”

Why Don’t You Just Bring a Boom Box With You?

What is wrong with people?

A Hispanic lady who looked like she was delivering flowers sat down next to me this afternoon, and her ear phones were so fucking loud, it was like sitting next to a boom box… playing irritatingly monotonous “cha cha cha” ethnic music (like in that Chappelle’s Show episode* with John Mayer when they play music in the Hispanic version of the barber shop).

Of course, this egregious violation of subway etiquette happens all the time, committed by all sorts of selfish people.  I’d kill all of them if I could, and the manufacturers of those shitty headphones they wear while I’m at it.

*Sorry that I couldn’t find the full video clip

There’s No Need to Stand All-Up-On-Me While We’re Waiting on Line

 

Was standing on a ridiculously long line at the bagel place today, and the vomit-inducing amorous young couple behind me wouldn’t stop bumping into my ass as the line inched forward. 

I remember staring angrily at her bag (which touched my ass every time she’d swing around to say the next annoying-as-hell-sweet-nothing to her *aggity-ass boyfriend).

I kept my cool on this one and didn’t say anything… only did a little angry staring that they apparently never picked up on… oh well…

The moral of the post though is that this is something that happens all the time.  Anytime I line up for anything — at the airport, the bagel place, whatever — there’s a chance that some asshole behind me has no concept of personal space and will ride my ass.  HELLO asshole: touching my ass has nothing to do with how fast you are going to get your fucking bagel.

Noble Old Chinese Woman

 

Tonight a little old Asian lady (I’m pretty sure she was Chinese) moved down a seat so that I could sit next to my friend Rose (I swear she’s not 80).

I thanked her “wow, that is so sweet, thank you.”

Every now and then, good things happen.  Strange right?

Teenage Sexuality on Subway Platforms: Just Say NO!

I was on the last car, watching the train pull into and out of stations from the rear window… When we pulled into one station, I witnessed a pair of ghetto-fabulous Hispanic teens in the middle of an [increasingly] serious make-out session on the platform.  I was in the last car, so of course, these kids were all the way on a far end of the platform of what I could discern was a already a lightly trafficked station.

From where they were standing they were actually pretty far away from the rest of the strap-hangers.  Which is what disturbed me…

As I watched the dude grabbing and fondling his girl’s ass, I wondered ”Is it possible that they’re going to start fucking after my train pulls out of the station?  Right there?  Up against a nasty, cold, red-painted-and-peeling steel pole underground in a nasty ass NYC subway station?”

Ew.