THE BUS: the good, the bad and the WAITING.

Okay, so I rode the bus. And it wasn’t that bad. Enough time has passed that I think I can safely say no one coughed Avian-flu onto me and, since no one actually coughed on me at all, I’m probably safe from T.B. as well. And I ate lunch without washing my hands first (although I wasn’t happy about it) and still seem to be free of any bacterial problems. I mean if I had a tapeworm I’d have seen some serious weight loss by now, right? So I survived unscathed. I haven’t been too ill to tell the rest of my bus tale, just too busy. I’m sorry if any of you were worried I had contracted brain fever and was no longer coherent enough to log onto the internet. My bad.

We had a simple plan: take a bus to the Haight, which would necessitate at least one transfer, shop for boots, eat lunch, take the bus back home. We also had a pocketful of quarters in case we were still in the Haight or between buses after our first transfer timed out. Although one useful thing I had already learned from the few times I road the train from the Sunset to the Castro is that most of the time no one actually checks for transfers – you can just get on and sit down. You could ride the bus for free until the unlucky day a cop checking transfers caught you and wrote you a ticket. I assume they make the penalty harsh enough that it isn’t cheaper to just employ this method full time. Okay, I tried to look that up but all I found was an anecdotal story that indicated a citation for not having a muni pass is $250. I did find THIS quote from an article on the subject,“Though statistics aren't available, MUNI (SF Transit) estimates put unpaid fares at five million dollars each year.”  And I’m already off-topic. Hard to believe I once got paid the medium-bucks for marketing, isn’t it? That I used to get paid for my ability to quickly and effectively get to the point? ANYWAY, heading out we were the only ones riding the bus that stops in front of our house (nine times out of ten when it passes us it is complete empty, except for the driver, and chugs on by without stopping) and the bus we transferred to was only mildly full (I think everyone onboard was seated) when it let us off in the Haight.

Right in front of Fluevog. So of course I have to digress and talk about boots. No surprise there. But this is not the story you think it is. This is a story… about JOHN. Yep. While I was picking up boots and putting them back down and frowning and trying to figure out what I exactly wanted out of the practical ankle boots I had come seeking I suggested John might kill time by trying on some boots of his own. So he did. And then something shocking and miraculous happened. For just a fleeting second John UNDERSTOOD how I feel about boots, or at least about the boots currently on his feet. He said, I swear to god, “Can I wear them out of the store?” Yes, not only had he found boots HE really liked (see picture) but he liked them so much, thought they were so great, he didn’t want to put his Converse back on. He was in boot love! An emotional state I have tried endlessly to explain to him. I had repeatedly gushed about how ridiculously amazing Fluevog’s Angel-Soled boots were (they resist alkali, water, acid, fatigue and Satan) but since I tend to gush about, well, lots of things, he didn’t really believe me that putting them on the first time was like “putting on your favorite boots you’ve already broken in” even though really, it is. I still actually marvel, when I lace up my knee-highs and stand up, how comfortable they are.

In the meantime I was having NO boot luck. They didn’t have either of the boots I liked in my size and I wasn’t going to get the exact same boots as John in a smaller size because: lame. The boots he picked out were similar to mine but different enough that we could wear them out together without feeling dorky. I finally decided (to the disapointment of the Fluevog sales associate) that I would just order boots online since I knew a 6 ½ of whatever I wanted would fit me. And later, that was exactly what I did and they arrived and made me quite happy. If they came in white I would order a pair to wear to work with my scrubs. I mean, if they resist alkali and acid they probably also resist dog-pee, right? Sadly the only white Fluevog shoes only come in MEN’S sizes, not women’s or unisex.

ANYWAY, I then discovered something else, which is you can totally get a contact high from someone else’s boot purchase. I was almost as happy that John had found boots (which yeah, I thought looked really yummy on him) as I would have been if we’d BOTH found boots. I still felt that warm “BOOTS” glow. Once the boot purchasing was done we had a quite tasty lunch (getting to eat really good BBQ ribs, while not as exciting as getting boots, is still pretty high on my list of happy-making-things) and then geared up for part two of our afternoon: Taking the bus back HOME.

This ended up being much more what I had expected from the bus riding thing. The two buses that were supposed to be half an hour apart were running, literally, right behind each other and when we got on (after 25 minutes of waiting, and not just random waiting, but “the bus should have been here at 2:00 and now it is 2:20 and it just went by the other way” kind of waiting. We got the last two seats. By the time we got off at the station to wait for the bus back to OUR neighborhood there were people onboard standing (and swaying) waiting to take our seats. So we got off, crossed the street and waited. And waited. And waited s’more. As bus after bus after bus that was not OUR bus pulled up, waited to see if we would get on and then pulled away again when we failed to move. Finally our bus came, we boarded with our just barely expired transfers and I got to experience the F.U.L.L. route (since we’d gotten on at practically the END of the route in front of our house) of OUR bus. It slowly ground up and down and around the hills of Twin Peaks. I’m pretty sure it did two circles, a capital cursiveR and a large figure eight before it finally lurched up our street. John opined that it would have been faster to just walk back up the mountain to our house from the station but, factoring in the 3 – 5 stops we would have had to make for me to have mini-asthma attacks (I wasn’t carrying my inhaler) I figure it would have timed out about the same. There was only one other couple on the bus, a cute little Asian couple that looked like they’d been married 50 years, and, unsurprisingly since our neighborhood is a residential area filled largely with retirees, they got off at our stop. And the empty bus chugged away.

Our mission was successfully completed! And for $3.00 we’d done in 3 ½ hours what we could have done for probably $0.41 cents in gas in less than two hours. Whoo!

Surprisingly (to me) what I ended up hating most about the bus was not that people were breathing germs on me. It was that these germ-infested people all have the ability and the right to YANK the damn cord and have the bus STOP where they want to get off. And since it is human nature (or at least American nature, which is why we all weigh an extra 20 – 100 pounds) to want to get off as close to where you are going as possible, the damn cord got yanked every couple blocks. I ended up thinking, “you could have gotten off two blocks ago the last time the cord was yanked and WALKED from there dammit!” about 27 times during our brief bus venture. The bus is SO freaking slow. Agonizingly slow. Between stopping at bus stops where people are waiting, stopping quite a bit in general SF traffic and then obligingly stopping every single time someone yanks the cord the bus is STOPPED more than it is in motion. As a control freak THIS, of course, bugs the CRAP out of me. If I have to be stopped in traffic I would SO rather be alone in my climate-controlled, doesn’t-smell like feet, comfy little Mini. But that’s okay, because I found a website that will calculate how many trees need to be planted to offset the damage you’re doing to the atmosphere and then you just pay them to go plant them for you.

A few days later, when John and I mapped out the route I would need to take after I was offered a job downtown and I realized I would have to take the bus, the TRAIN (which is notorious for being late and breaking down) and then ANOTHER bus I had to politely decline the offer. I also had to say no because the floors were dirty. It literally took all my restraint not to clean the exam room I was in while I was waiting to be interviewed. But even if it had been my dream* job, there was no way I was taking on that morning commute. I was trying to imagine it in the rain in the dark and I came up with a BIG OLD NO FREAKING WAY.

So I have to find a job with either PARKING or only one tranfer. Hopefully one that doesn't involve waiting for the train that sometimes never comes. Wish me luck.

*I am pretty confident my dream job will never include GROOMING cats. Sure, watching them blink bitterly into the gusting hairdryers that clip onto their kennels is pretty entertaining but that would certainly NOT make up for the scratches I would incur while trying to shove a feline into soapy water. I’ve learned this the hard way – Cats don’t like baths. At all. I have the scars to prove it.


- Related Link: http://www.fluevog.com

Laurel VS. Public Transportation

Tomorrow I am taking the bus somewhere. I haven’t figured out where yet. But I know the bus that stops literally right across from my house goes to a main stationy-thing (I should probably find out what that is called) and that from there you can get on MANY different buses that go many different places. So that’s what John and I are going to do. Get on the bus, get off the bus, get on another bus and then get off and walk to, well, maybe someplace that sells boots. And yes I know I need to know the number of the bus and of other buses and where they go and when they pick up and after I post this I plan to get online and figure all that out along with what, exactly, a transfer is, how it works, how long it is good for and why it looks like some people get on and off the bus without ever paying. I have many things to learn.

So why does this rate a blog entry? Because, with ONE exception about eight years ago when I came into the city to hang out with Joel and somehow he convinced me it would be easier to get wherever we were going on the bus, I have NEVER ridden the bus. In my memory there was an old lady with live chickens in her lap but I think my memory may have added that later for narrative amusement. I do remember it was gross and crowded and slow and I didn’t like it AT ALL. Because *I* am a SUBURBS girl.

Until we moved to the city last fall I had spent my entire life living in a variety of suburbs. The ugly suburbs of Northeast Bakersfield, the dorms surrounded by houses of UOP, the rolling hills of Marin county (I don’t actually think it gets more suburban than that), the Victorian houses of Old Petaluma (I could walk to the store and to the downtown shops but my little cottage was still totally in the ‘burbs part of it) and last but not least the delusions-of-grandeur-having suburbs of Folsom (once a nice little town with a famous prison and many oak trees -- now an ever-expanding parking lot covered with foreclosed houses that didn’t exist two years ago).

Yep – 36 years of suburb living. Not suburban living (which would mean more like city living which is weird but so is MUCH of the English language – growing up in the suburbs probably means that you are NOT suburban and now I’ve gotten to the point where neither even sounds like a real word in my head anymore so I am going to just leave it) but actual living in the suburbs. I’m not proud of it. But I grew up in Bakersfield where if you wanted to see something OTHER than tract houses and fog (winter) or tract houses and heat haze (summer) you had to walk at least ¾ of a mile. Which I did. As soon as I got old enough I walked to school and as a teenager I was willing to walk, in 100 degree weather, in full “summer” goth regalia (black boots, shorts, t-shirt and SPF 15 which is, I THINK, as high as it went back them) to get to my friend’s house or to Longs to buy an ice cream cone. But if you wanted to go any further than that you had to drive or be driven. So my parents drove me all over the place when I was little.

And pretty much from the MOMENT I got my drivers license I never walked anywhere again. Thus starting the pattern in my life of always being the friend who had a car. In high school, in college, I was the girl who had a car and would drive. Especially in high school when the car I was driving was a brand new Chrysler Laser Turbo which, after I wrecked it the first weekend I got it and then they put it all back together again, I drove everywhere. Sometimes with as many as six people crammed into it. That law they have now about how during the first six months teenagers have their licenses they can’t drive any OTHER teenagers without a grown up in the car? That’s because of me. Sorry teenagers. But I digress. The point is I liked driving, never minded having to drive, never even minded being the designated driver once that became an issue because being the driver means you are IN CONTROL. I love, both metaphorically and literally, being in the driver’s seat.

I like it to the point that, if possible, I will drive somewhere instead of fly. Or take the train. I hate AMTRACK. My parents thought it might be a good way of my getting back and forth from University to Bakersfield for holidays and so I tried it. Once. And I hated it. The train stopped in every single town and never got over 50mph. A drive I could have done in three hours and forty minutes took SIX hours on the train. SIX! Also, if you are driving you get to decide that, if you want to stop for Taco Bell two hours into the drive and then stop again at hour four to use a restroom and buy a Hershey bar, you can. I like that control. I like controlling the temperature of the car, what kind of music is playing and how loud it is. I pretty much like everything about driving. I like driving so much that for fifteen years I bought stick-shifts on purpose because it felt MORE like driving. I do NOT, however, like feeling like I need knee replacement surgery after being stuck in traffic for an hour and I REALLY do not like rolling BACKWARDS into the car behind me (which is always a Mercedes, don’t ask me why) after I get stuck on a steep hill. So once I knew we were moving to the city I knew it was time to trade my stick shift in for an automatic. Since that automatic engine was packaged in a brand new green Mini Cooper S, I didn’t mind at all. Now I giggle manically while accelerating up the mountain to my house.

So yeah, I love driving. I’m a control freak who is, incidentally, terrified of flying (but they make pills for that so I CAN fly when I need to go someplace I can’t really drive to, like New Jersey). But that isn’t the ONLY reason I dread the bus and have managed to avoid it for nearly ten months. I’m ALSO a bit of a germaphobe. Just running errands in the city I always try to remember to WASH MY HANDS before I eat something. I don’t fear CRIME, just bacteria. I don’t even like using shopping carts at the Safeway because I have seen the OTHER people who use them and while they are a HIGHLY diverse and entertaining bunch (I can’t imagine I will ever get tired of the street theater that goes on 24/7 here) I can tell some of them aren’t quite as obsessed with cleanliness as I am. Plus I saw that episode of Oprah where she had people go around and swab things in public for germs and all KINDS of nasty stuff was on everything.

So riding the bus is a bit like being trapped IN the germy shopping cart. A big germy shopping cart filled with germy people coughing TB on you that goes really slowly, stops all the time to let more germy people on and then doesn’t even go exactly where I want to go. I do not want to take the bus. Really.

But, I do want to get a job soon and I have no delusions whatsoever that whatever vet hires me is going to have employee parking. There IS no free parking. John has to pay some ridiculous price every month to park on the roof of his own building. If the vet I end up working for DOES actually have, say, four parking spaces in a teeny lot they will be for clients. And maybe the vet himself. But certainly not for smock-wearing me. And most likely what will surround the building I work in will be many other buildings and metered parking. And at $1.50 an HOUR I couldn’t really afford to keep the meter fed even if they WERE willing to let me stop working every HOUR to run outside and feed quarters into the meter.

So tomorrow I ride the bus. I’m taking John so that while I may have to battle germs I at least know I won’t get lost or get distracted by reading my book and look up and realize I’ve taken the bus to Bayview. Something I would so do. So we’re going to practice. Wish me luck! Hopefully we’ll get safely home and back without getting lost OR having someone cough bird flu onto me.