Friday, April 19, 2013

It's so funny

It's so funny how whenever I go home for the weekend using Amtrak from Milwaukee to Union Station and then Union Station to the various southwest suburbs how I see the very same kids, the same kid I used to be.

All wearing the miserable khakis, the dog-collar-like lanyard, the longish, uncomfortable hair, the bursting-with-books backpack that always seems to tire even the strongest and most muscular of College Preparatory students' backs, the exhausted expressions they wear almost daily and the faces of relief each Friday.

"Just this train ride separates me and being home and relaxing," I would think to myself each Friday.

I remember how much I disliked the tumult the school provided me. Piles upon piles of homework, I would have to wake up at 5:40 a.m. each morning to get to a mere 8:00 a.m. class and how desperately I yearned for sleep all throughout the duration of the week.

The school wasn't bad, it was just unnecessarily difficult paired with an arduous commute each morning and afternoon. I grew from not minding the daily Metra rides to deploring them.

They're awful. They're noisy, bumpy, uncomfortable, often smell of unburned hydrocarbons from the archaic diesel engine that drives the polished steel barge that carries miserable business people and students to their miserable businesses and schools.

Above all, they're not even particularly fast. Honestly, Metra trains are reminders of what the British Revolutionary-era steam-powered trains were like, the ones that rocketed that nation to economic prosperity in the 1800s.

We are living so behind the times; where bullet trains in Europe and Japan reign.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Daily Women's Rights Activists

I am fine with women's rights. I am not some behind-the-times, nearly-senile, old fool who cannot come with grips with the sheer fact that women, unbelievably, are also human beings.

However, when it comes to my new job (as a parking lot attendant) I cannot stand one peculiar character quality.

That is, the sense of entitlement some of the particularly female parking structure patrons feel to outrightly ignore every last action I perform.

I am not a rapist. I am not a sexual predator, offender, or whatever deviant description you wish to throw at me. But some women sure act this is to the contrary. So why do you show such ambivalence to interact with your friendly parking attendant at every last opportunity you have?!

At least give me a smile in return!

There are far too many female patrons to count who are in such a hurry, who are so self-centered, so aggressive, so impossibly late for appointment x that they cannot so much as give me a thank you.

No, my job is not an exercise of sainthood. It is not an unimaginably selfless task I perform each day; it involves simply letting patrons through the fiberglass gates.

However, if you could just, for a mere moment, remove your blinders, and realize that there is a human being inside the booth that is letting you through the gates, in the very same way you so gravely value your human being-ness, and give me some sort of acknowledgement. Rather than hiding behind your Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, your leather-wrapped interior, and your name-brand everything to be so militaristically, stoically inhuman!

 There is a women's revolution happening. And some, not all, women seem to feel it is their inalienable right to act like (forgive the term) utter "bitches."