nin137

Nick's Journal
2008-04-22 16:25:56 (UTC)

People are out of the Minds

my mornings consist of my wedging myself up against the
window of the bus, pulling out my economist and slowly
losing myself in the current food crisis. once in a while,
passengers have other ideas and i am sadly enough torn from
my earnest reading material into the world of utter morons.

you see, the buses i ride on have two types of seating. one
is the standard facing the front of the bus (which consist
of two seats, and the other is the type of seating which
faces the side of the bus (which has anywhere from 3 to 4
seats).

so there i was, sitting in one of the two seaters when i
couldn't help but notice a commotion to my right.
"there's a seat there and i want to sit down!" came from a
man (actually more of a boy, he had a baby face) who was
trying to wedge his anus in between two passengers, one of
whom was an extremely obese man and the second was what
could only be described as a female punk rocker.
much to the dismay of the fat man, and in spite of the
protests uttered by the female punk rocker, man-boy
proceeding to cram his slim anus into the seat. the
resulting sight was hilarious.
he had managed to cram himself into what must have amounted
into 1/3 of a seat (thanks to the fat man's overflow). he
wasn't so much sitting IN the seat, as firmly wedged between
the two co-bus-riders, slightly hovering above it. it
looked extremely uncomfortable, but, as with any moral
victory, i suppose that you just can't give it up once
you've won.

so as i walked the last trek of my journey to law school,
chuckling to myself about what i had just witnessed, i came
across my second piece of entertainment of the day.
now, having been subject to public transportation for the
past 4 years of my life, i have come to realize that people
will go to great lengths to catch a specific train/bus at a
specific time. i set myself early boundaries as to how far
i would go to catch a form of public transit.
i told myself i would not knock over children, the elderly,
or pregnant women (which, surprisingly is a hard taboo to
abide by if you're a business man and late to an important
meeting); and also, i that, where the risk of me dying
trying to catch the transit substantially outweighs any
benefit i could derive from getting on it, i decide to just
let it go.

sadly, the asian woman teetering at the crosswalk right
before my law school did not have the same value system in
place. i noticed her first because she was so close to the
edge of the sidewalk; trucks rush by, and had one come by at
that time, i'm sure that a mirror would have clocked her in
the head.
after a few seconds i realized why she was so close to road.
she was thinking about running for it. you see, just as
our "do not walk" sign came up, the bus that she apparently
wanted to catch pulled up.
now the problem with this particular intersection is that,
while you can easily gauge the traffic coming at you from
the left (as it crests on an uphill slope), the traffic on
your right, is extremely dangerous because it comes over a
downhill crest. meaning that, you have maybe 2 seconds from
the time at which a mazda miata comes barreling over the
intersection to your imminent demise.
this, of course, is compounded by the fact that the traffic
is coming from the right. meaning that, you find yourself
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD at that time that you realize that
you're fucked.

all of this didn't seem to bug the asian lady. upon
ascertaining that the left was free and clear, she boogied.
i kind of gasped and sure enough, just as she reached the
middle a service van came barreling over the crest from the
right. the brake screeching and honking was insane, the van
swerved into the other lane, the asian lady did what i
thought was a dance of death, but in the end she managed to
make it to the other side (not without earning some lengthy
verbal abuse while in the process, from the driver that had
just swerved to miss her).
unbelievably, instead of kneeling down and praising whatever
monkey god asians praise, SHE KEPT ON RUNNING FOR THE BUS!!!
not only that, but she managed to bang on its sides, cause
it to stop, and defiantly got on!

i didn't know whether to start a slow clap or just keel over
and pass the fuck out. that was the single most adrenaline
inducing thing i've seen in a long fucking time.

so of course that leads me to my last, and not nearly as
exciting point. can we please get off of the bio-diesel
fuels? after having read about the food crisis and
researching opionions online; not only does it seem that
biofuel is not nearly the environmental savior it was billed
ot be, but that it also has serious deleterious side-effects.
people are fucking starving because the price of food is
skyrocketing. now, granted, this is not all due to the
increase in biofuels, and is also largely attributable to
regional ineptness and corruption; it just seems to me that
we should put out the biofuels fire.
for some reason it seems horrible wrong to burn something
that others are dying to eat.
apart from that, i wish that the EU would get off its
moronic high horse and allow GMOs. it would seem that, the
best way to solve this problem is the increase yield per
square acre, rather than create more acreage upon which to
plant food. GMOs seem to drastically increase such yield.




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