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Monday, May 19th, 2008

What is a bus without people?

I thought when I woke up this morning that I was giving myself ample time, but one bagel and a cat fight later, I was way later than I could afford to be. I sang tensely to "Penny Lane" as I destroyed the highway in record time, swore when I didn't see the train there (it's 7:10 and the train leaves at 7:11!), said, "Oh, oh!" when I did see the train there, then searched for a parking spot, selecting the first one I spotted.

"Oh, good," I said dryly. "666. That's definitely a good start to the day." I pulled through to 681 just in case.

I clip-clopped across the street and onto the train, telling the $2 parking fee box to fuck off. I read some of my book and then slept. The man next to me wore a big heavy black sweater and read The Order of the Phoenix ("The Beetle at Bay").

At South Station, I got onto the wrong fucking train, and that pisses me off, because HOW CAN I NOT NAVIGATE THE T FLAWLESSLY YET? Like, how old am I? Why can I never grasp inbound vs. outbound? I'm truly dreadful with mental directions. This was made more obvious by an inability to look at a proper map before later getting off the bus. All I (stupidly) wrote down was, "N. on X Street, L. on Y Street." Which is absolutely useless when you hardly know what town you're in, never mind which direction the sun rises. Naturally, I walked the wrong way for too long, asked for Y Street from someone unhelpful, then eventually sat down on a rock wall and called my mom. She looked at a satellite picture and tried to direct me, but all I could see was twenty intersections, the Charles River, and a Staples. I tried to locate myself for her, but already being five minutes late for my first day of work, I could really only shout, "I can't read that stupid sign! Mona...tuk? Nomatuba? Do you see anything around where I was standing before that has a long stupid name? IIIIIII'm SO TIRED OF BEING BLIND."

Eventually, I went into Staples, where two workers and one customer looked at a map and tried to locate me. The map did not have Y Street labeled, either. After twenty minutes of wandering around in peep-toe heels, the customer finally pointed me in the right direction--and it happened to be about 100 yards to the left of the bus stop I had gotten off at in the first place.

Once I was in, I was fine. As it turned out, my boss was also late because of traffic, so all of the navigation drama was for nothing. However, while I sat there reading the magazine and waiting, I noticed it was 9:45. I had been awake for four whole hours and nothing had even started or mattered yet. I took this as an omen, particularly in light of my hellish morning numbers and the fake period I could suddenly feel. Yet the rest of the day was quite pleasant. I have a corner desk with a beautiful view of the Charles, with a half-hour walking trail to take at lunchtime (when I eat fruit and things, because it is, after all, a holistic magazine). The offices are more chic than you'd think, looking at the building from the outside; the colors and brickwork are nice to look at. I spent most of the day filling out forms and twirling a Rolodex, but this does not worry me. At my last internship, my responsibilities included approximately NOTHING. This time, there will always be something to do, and I enjoy that very much, because it will make my Mondays go by fast and my Tuesdays even faster. For instance? Tomorrow morning (I will only be there for two hours) I plan on answering reader mail. That's nice busy work. (Although, for real, fake period? You're not even supposed to be here right now. Quit while you're ahead, you're just going to be mad in two weeks.)

My journey home was much easier than it was getting there. Because I felt misled by the MBTA website, I skittered towards the bus, which I knew wouldn't just sit there for much longer, and asked the driver, "This will bring me to Harvard, right?" to which he smiled, "Just for you." A moment after me, another woman scrambled on, thanking him for waiting. "What is a bus without people?" he asked.

I missed the train I wanted to take by ten minutes, which meant I had to hang out in the station for a while eating an Auntie Anne's pretzel dog and massaging my feet, which had finally started to blister. On the train home, I thought about how I was going to arrive at 7:11, exactly the time I had left that morning. A twelve-hour day that had flown by like magic and dragged on for a ridiculous amount of time between lunch and rush hour. I was tired and beaten but it felt good to know that I would be spending the summer doing the types of editorial bullshit I've been wanting to do, simply because I've got to do it at some point.

And with that being said, I didn't appreciate the parking ticket in my windshield calling me "LAZ."

 

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