Wasabisoft

I just got another wrong number caller again. This Jamaican-accent middle aged lady keeps calling at around 9:30am for three days, I keep telling her she has the wrong number. When I pick up I would say hi and she’ll say hi so then I say hi again since the caller didn’t present an objective. So she says hi again. Finally, perhaps after a two minute exchange of hello’s, I go, you called yesterday too. Doof.

Denial in fact runs across every spectrum of topics. For example, when on the subway there are seats.  As the post suggests, I have play on words with denial riders.  You know “the nile” riders like riders in the river, get it?  Ok… moving on.

Now these seats aren’t the grandiose luxury of seats, but for $2 pay per rides, a plastic seat with gum stuck on the bottom and maybe some engraved love or gang signs with an occasional graffiti mark is a seat a rider is entitled to. Every progressive year humanity just decides to backtrack making it’s way to the Stone Age in every way – language, behavior, attitude, food, materials, government, the world… and so forth. Language is a fun entry I will write about another day.

So these $2 seats. In NYC, there are a lot of… let me say “wide” riders who likes to take up more than one seat. Now by all means, being wide is not against the law nor means you are a bad person (though in this case it seems to be NYC wide riders are usually pretty bad). Without going into the details of why someone is wide, I’m sure there are good reasons. Wide riders usually take up 2-3 seats on the train. Understandable, these riders cannot move out of their way for you to sit next to them. But when there is one seat left, and physics says that seat will not fit your big and wide volume, please do not try and make yourself believe you are a size 0 and squeeze in.

There’s also the ignorer riders. Ignorer riders consist of those that act like they do not see or hear you when you tell them to scoot over from taking two seats when they certainly can fit into one. The first type of ignorer riders are men. For some reason, men feel the need to sit with their indurate legs spread wide open to let their family jewels hang for air drying. The second type of ignorer riders are sleepers. Sleepers like to act like they’re sleeping, or at times really are sleeping, and do not budge or move during the entire ride except for when they get to their station, miraculously, decide to spring into awareness and get off. The third type of ignorer riders are those who finds some form of entertainment to bypass time. These riders include book readers, Ipod-ers, newspaper readers, crossword puzzle, hand held casino poker, PSP, DS, etc. These riders certainly are awake and aware enough to entertain themselves, but will look away and make the effort to ignore you when you tell them to move for a seat. Now by all means I like to piss them off by being very polite when asking, and then poking them with my umbrella when I see the effort to ignore. I’m sure you can deny hearing my voice and a visual entity in front of you, but you cannot deny the annoyance of my umbrella, and perhaps pain, thrusting towards your direction.  Anyway, usually I get these seats are for my mom, so I also pull out the “how can you disrespect the elderly” card, even though my mom vehemently feels she’s not that elderly. I think if you’re over half a century you’re in the elderly category, but that’s another type of denial.

It occurs that women like to cross their legs while sitting on these lovely seats. I for one cannot figure out how you believe that sitting with your legs crossed equals to comfort while the train is rocking back and forth with sudden stops that you always seem to twitch and swirl your leg towards bystanders or the person sitting next to you. Better yet, these lovely legs are usually big and wide, and each of these legs have their own weapon. The shoe. The shoe weaponry is vast in collection. Let me just name a few. The slippers. In the summer I love to step on these ladies – and gentlemen – who thinks that their feet should be exposed to the confined little can with 60+ passengers is in fact, not aware their feet is not an air freshener.  This also applies to arm pits, especially during rush hour when the little can is +100 passengers.  The heels and the sneakers are also very brutal.  When these women swing their legs due to the movement of the train, their soles would strike someone, whether the person sitting next to them or the person standing in the vicinity.  There is no way you can deny the fact your shoe’s imprint is on someone else’s pants.  Of course, these women rarely apologizes for their shoe signatures (maybe they feel their shoe prints are very important?  showing their personalities of full of BS?).

A little taste of the NYC MTA.  Please enjoy your trip to the city next time!