people all 'round the world, join in

There is nothing quite like listening to Love Train by the O’Jays when riding a train. We have a gramma announcer who likes to chastise us and nag us and tell us not to walk around without our shoes on, etc. I really wish I had some kind of minidisk recording device or something so I could record these priceless moments.

I am using my noise-cancellation headphones and streaming in a ‘70s soundtrack, so I don’t really hear the gramma announcer when she comes on. My neighbor told me that she just announced that the dining car is open and that a movie will be showing soon. For some odd reason, that reminded me of the brilliant movie showing Smith College had when I was in orientation my first year. They showed Jaws in the swimming pool. I guess they used one of the white brick walls as a projection screen, and had everyone who wanted to see it blow up inner tubes and just…well, sit in the water and watch it. At the time I couldn’t deal with scary movies in any way, shape or form, so I missed out. However, maybe that was a good thing because that pool was always insanely cold.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so much instruction or bossing around getting on a train in my life. These dorks in Chicago could learn something from Penn Station in NYC, let me tell you. Transportation folks in NYC can’t fuck around with bad organization skills. They just have too much traffic. You would think Chicago would, too, but whatever. The woman in charge of opening the gate kept yelling at people who were standing around waiting to board and telling them to go sit down elsewhere. She was very particular about who was supposed to stand or sit where and it didn’t ultimately have any rhyme or reason. Now we have this very chatty woman on the overhead announcement system yapping about how we need to be considerate and keep the bathrooms clean and how we need to be mindful of little kids and how we shouldn’t smoke on the train because they’d have to stop the train and throw us off and we don’t want THAT, do we?