1. Teenagers in hooded sweatshirts. It’s starting to get pretty cold at 7:30am. Normally it’s around 30 degrees, and yesterday it was 24 degrees with a wind chill that Felt Like 14. Walking to the subway, I wore a long-sleeve t-shirt, a turtleneck sweater, heavy black corduroys, a 3-quarters length gray wool coat, a scarf, gloves, and a ski cap with ear flaps… and my whole body was numb. Walking furiously to generate enough heat to counteract the unrelenting blustery breeze, I pass a clump of teenagers at a bustop. And what were these young folks wearing? Hooded sweatshirts. Yes, with the exception of the insane chick wearing a flimsy pinstriped blazer over a knee-legth dress and Uggs, every single teenager wore a thin hooded sweatshirt with the hood casually pulled up and their hands casually stuffed in the pockets. Thinking back to my own coatless teenaged years, I don’t think that it’s because dressing warmly is uncool, I really think it’s because teenagers are somehow impervious to the cold.
2. Man tying shoelaces. I try to sublimate my hyper-sensitivity about etiquette, because the inevitable consequence of placing too much of my happiness on the manners of strangers is constant seething. So I deal with it. A person can be talking loudly on an otherwise quiet subway car, or walking in the middle of the bikepath, or spewing germs via an uncovered mouth and nose, and I won’t allow the flicker of perturbation to manifest because I know the moment will pass and life will go on. But this morning, as I exited the underground area of South Station, I found that my usually smooth egress route was clogged with people. As I hobbled up the stairs, I discovered that the obstruction was a man who decided to stop and tie his shoelaces on the stairs, in the thick of the busy crowds thronging out of South Station. What a sociopath. By leveraging the stairs in order to more easily reach his shoelaces at the expense of scores of people, he proved worthy of the Evil Eye.
3. Joe the Plumber. Did you hear Joe the Plumber has a book deal? Yes, McCain’s former Blue-Collar Mascot says he plans to use his literary endeavor to share his ideas about American values. Joe also admits that he is currently unemployed and “I got no financial offers. I am broke.” What? I thought he was making $250,000 a year and that’s why he confronted Obama about his tax plan, but I guess it was all a fantasy, or maybe Joe “got no” job after he got off of the McCain Straight Talk Express. When Joe’s book bombs because the only people who care about what an unemployed plumber from Ohio has to say about American values are the people who “got no” money, will he have to consider sharing the wealth of public assistance?
