Public Transportation Etiquette

To the just-too-adorable-for-words Gap-clad girl riding the brown line with me last night:

It's true, trains are crowded at 5:30 on a Tuesday evening. Stop expressing your amazement over and over and over. You also might consider grabbing on to one of the poles provided for exactly that purpose, rather than clutching your equally-adorable Abercrombie-clad boyfriend, then squealing and giggling and being flung about every time the train lurches, especially when the two people on either side of you, continually battered by your flailing body, keep moving aside to make space for you to grab the pole. (Also? Your boyfriend's insistence on reading the free daily while you try to talk to him is totally passive-aggressive, not as adorably silly as you think it is.) When you do break down and grab that pole 6 stops later, you might want to consider bending your elbows, so that you leave a little bit of room for the other passengers. And while standing there with your arms perfectly straight, it's really not necessary to lean way back in order to get underneath the boyfriend's free daily, in an effort to catch his attention by reading the gossip pages aloud to him. Additionally, when there is a little extra space in the train, and you feel your back pressed up against a stranger's left arm, you maybe want to take a half step forward. Maybe. Or, you know, just stay there until said stranger finally shuffles away and smushes herself into the wall of the train car in order to not be touching you if at all possible. And for the record, said stranger also may not enjoy having your adorably bushy ponytail right in her face either.

In other words? This is your dance space. This is my dance space. STAY THE HELL OUT OF MY DANCE SPACE.

"Our lives are different than other people's."

OK, so that quote is attributable to Oz on Buffy, and I will readily admit that my life is not all about demon killing and dark magic... but do you ever have that moment where all you can think is, "One of these things is not like the other... and it's me"? It's happened to me quite a lot recently.

1. Chatting with a coworker a few weeks ago, he asked what my weekend plans were, and I told him: "I'm having Korean night with my friends! We're going out for Korean fried chicken, then going to see The Host." "The Hoax? The Richard Gere movie?" "No, you know, the Korean horror flick that's supposed to be AMAZING." This was met with silence and, in ensuing weeks, statements about how he's not into "art-house movies" like I am.

2. At a baby shower last weekend, I realized I was one of only two women of my generation there without children. Actually, that means I was one of only two women there at all without children. And I know the other one is working on having children. Hmmm.... Anyway, at some point, conversation turned to movies, and one woman declared, "I haven't seen anything in theaters that wasn't a kids' movie since 1997" and everyone else chimed in with a similar statement. I decided not to mention that I had gone to 28 Weeks Later the night before. I'm pretty sure it's not appropriate for children, anyway.

3. Sat through a long conversation about golf this morning. Contributed nothing.

To Sum Up: Anthropomorphized: Good; Suicidal: Bad

When I was in college, many of my friends thought I had a problem with anthropomorphized food.

This was untrue. I only had a problem with a very specific kind of anthropomorphized food.

The subject came up because I had issues with this M&Ms commercial that was all over the place in the mid-'90s. It was a cartoon in which the M&Ms all went to boot camp. They were living in barracks, doing obstacle courses, saluting their superiors, diving into vats of colored... something... which would eventually create their colorful candy shells.

The thing that killed me was that these M&Ms were training to be the very best M&Ms they could be. And why? So they could be consumed by greedy humans. It's like M&Ms were lemmings or something, not only resigned to their suicidal fates, but actually excited about them... I guess M&Ms were the precursors to suicide bombers. I don't know if they were promised 70 M&M virgins in heaven, though.

So I used to complain about this commercial a lot (because, you know, I watched TV a lot), leading many people to erroneously believe I just had problems with walking, talking food, or food with faces (which I so did not! just ask my roommate how much I loved her happy M&M man, who dispensed candy to all who came to our house!). He understood, though, exactly where I was coming from, which is why, as soon as I got online this morning, he sent me this.

I'm so glad to know someone else understands where we're coming from.

(I have since realized that he must have found that link here, so credit where credit's due.)