Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Above it all, there are still cool things that happen

Today while riding on BART I saw a man tear an article out of the newspaper. It only took him about two seconds, but he did it without folding or bending the page in any way what so ever and his finished product was an absolutely perfect rectangle. I'm serious, completely non-jagged edges and right angles all around. I've never seen anything like it.

A few days ago a woman sat front of me on BART and almost immediately started poking the air with her finger as though she were running through a fencing routine. She was very clean and dressed all in Nike athletic gear and did not really fit the profile of your typical BART "crazy person" (I don't like that terminology, but there are some passengers that are clearly plugged in to a different reality than the rest of the train). She in fact bore some resemblance to a woman we had profiled on Current that did the Olympic pentathlon at age 40-something, which included fencing so I thought it might be her. In a few minutes, however, she pulled out a sheaf of xeroxed pages stapled at the top with every fourth or so paragraph highlighted in yellow. In my surreptitious peeking (not so as not to be noticed, but so as not to become nauseated by annoying ever-present motion sickness) I could see that the lines that were highlighted were designated to Polonius. So, she was practicing her scenes from Hamlet...which raised a number of questions...is someone nearby putting on Hamlet? Is it just she that has a gender-reversed role or is the whole cast of opposite than usual gender? (I know that that's happened a few times as a play on the old "all women are played by men" way of doing things). After an exhaustive search through the internet I can't find any answers to my questions, but I'm a known failure in the realms of Google.

Also, I have also discovered, on the BART, what is at least the real-life inspiration for a PIXAR character (see photo) and is quite possibly at most me from the future for some reason always riding the BART on Sundays in the exact same car in the seat right behind where I always sit. When I figure out the necessary technology I will provide the photo I furtively took of him with my cell phone (I had to!), but until then just believe me that he looks exactly like this guy:
And, since PIXAR is located in nearby Emeryville it is far from far-fetched that he is the actual inspiration for this character...

Anyway, I write this blog today because it makes me happy to notice this stuff. I have the opportunity to notice it largely because I can't read on the BART, due to the fore-mentioned motion-sickness, and I notice things like that fairly often which leads me to believe these kinds of things are happening all the time and I just don't see all of them. It makes me happy to know that, no matter what is happening in my life or in the world at large, weird little things that are amazing to those notice are always happening and will always happen.
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"Stickshifts and Safety Belts" by Cake from Fashion Nugget. I'm not going to spend a lot of time analyzing this one suffice to say it has been a part of my life since the first time I heard riding in the car with my sister. This song has everything that makes a great Cake song great and also transcends to be just a great song. No one does that almost Sesame Street for adults without being cheesy or condescending like Cake. Fashion Nugget doesn't have a bad song on it and this one is the best on the record.

1 comment:

  1. This blog illustrates many of the reasons that I love you the way I do.

    ReplyDelete