Ruminations on the Bolt Bus

As I type these words a young man is nodding in and out of sleep over his MacBook Pro to my left as vistas of scenic Yonkers speed by on my right. Yes, through the wonders of modern technology I am connected to the Internet and traveling to Boston at the same time. I really have no concept of the mechanism that makes this possible. Am I getting service via a cell phone signal? Is there some giant satellite dish on top of the bus (I checked as I was getting on but it could be in the middle, out of view. Buses are tall)? Regardless, this magical manifestation of modernity allows me to bore you with these observations:

The Bolt Bus stops at the corner of eighth avenue on thirty-fourth street. There's a plaque commissioned by the Ukrainian American Society on the building there which recognizes the location as the site of Nikola Tesla's death. I briefly wondered at the possibility of deliberate symbolism in deciding to have a giant red bus with a lightning bolt on the side stopping in front of Tesla's death place.

Hell's Kitchen seems like a sort of adorable neighborhood. After four years in New York I'd never seen it before today.

Initially none of the power outlets were working on the bus. This created a sort of mini-hysteria. The tensions ran so high that the bus driver pulled over at ninth avenue and fifty-first street to fix the problem. We had been moving for seven minutes and the repair took at least ten.

According to their website, Bolt Bus stops at 34th and 8th when going to Boston and Philly and 36th and 7th when going to DC. Wouldn't it make more sense to have the Philly and DC buses stopping in the same place on the West side with easy access to the Lincoln tunnel and have the Boston bus stop somewhere further east with easy access to the Tri-Borough bridge or at least FDR drive? It took us forty-five minutes to get out of Manhattan today.

I saw a giant beautiful rainbow ahead to the east as we turned on to 287. A prodigious sign, to be sure.

The dude in front of me is totally watching Reality Bites.

At five-thirty we passed the last exit in Norwalk, CT. This was two and a half hours into our supposedly four hour and fifteen minute trip. I might reach the end of the internet.

I uesd to not be able to sleep on any moving vehicle, but somehow in the last year or so the opposite has become true and I have started nodding off without even meaning to. I am worried that this is the first sign of an early-onset dementia. Also, since I unwittingly napped today, what if I'm not tired enough tonight to go to sleep early to wake up early tomorrow to go to sleep early tomorrow to wake up early on Saturday for the LSAT????? Seriously. I am not very good at sleeping.

In addition to mid-90's melodrama, the dude in front of me is assiduously tracking our progress forward on Google maps. He should clearly be traveling by plane.

This has essentially devolved into a Twitter. I'm going to go watch funny stuff on Hulu.

One summer I did this writer's workshop at UMASS Boston. I was turning fifteen and my parents didn't really know how to handle the too old for camp, too young to let loose balance. I didn't produce anything so fantastic (except perhaps that poem about bathrobes that I might be able to recite to this day), but I wrote this one essay that was published in the magazine at the end of the course about writer's block, pasta salad and my toes. This post is basically a rehash of that story, ten years later (oh god, I am so old. Pour me a metamucil). Also an excuse to mention my fantastic sneakers.

Sometimes it seems like social interactions are comprised of exposition ("I have done x, y and z things since we spoke last"), debate ("Obsessive attention to capitalization is NOT a valid reason for disliking e.e. cummings as a poet") and advice. I think I might be really into advice. Both giving and receiving. I don't know that I'm good at it, but there's something rewarding about the exercise of figuring things out through conversation. Lately whenever I am giving advice, even to myself when sitting on the couch wearing one shoe, the word perspective comes to mind. I feel like I use it so often that it is becoming meaningless. But when I look at things objectively it becomes clear that the only reason I feel a certain way so strongly is because of the circumstances around me. Give it a try. Is there really any problem you have, like something that's bugging you or unsatisfying, that couldn't be changed with a shift in perspective?

When I was talking to my mom the other day I came to realize that it's probably impossible for a single person not think about her love life. Even if you aren't really wanting to date or meet people, if you aren't with someone part of you is probably looking. It's a strange cycle and it makes things sort of annoying. I don't want a boyfriend but being single is kind of a chore. I wonder if people who have taken religious vows of celibacy are really completely free of this. Or if it's more an exercise in pushing away thoughts of sex and romance. I actually can't remotely comprehend the cloistered lifestyle. It's awful but my life is completely selfish in ways. And selflessness on that scale is... something other than what experience as life.

To be frank (because who really reads this anyway?) I feel a little bit funny about what I write on this blog and how personal I get and what the real purpose is. That last paragraph is probably the most I've ever written about my love life. Sometimes I have ideas for posts that would betray a specific event or feeling I'm having and I get nervous because I think that someone else will feel betrayed or that my exboyfriend will read it or blah, blah, blah. But I was thinking about the last few months and from my usual perspective (visualized as a stick figure on a director's chair in my brain) I haven't been doing much. But when I looked back at an old email I wrote in March (and never sent) I realized that there are a lot of things that are pretty different now. I was fatalistically perceiving time since I broke up with Josh as a flat line of events (work, walks and whiskey). But actually I'm in a totally different place now. And if reading something I wrote could make me realize that, could alter my perspective if you will, then it really is important to keep writing regularly and hope that the self-involvedness will dissolve eventually. Phew.

FIN