Yesterday morning I was stuck on the subway for about twenty minutes, in the tunnel, with other people. If I had to rate it, being “stuck on the subway” is only slightly better than “getting stuck in hell with Rush Limbaugh and Heidi and Spencer” (disclaimer: I am not quite sure that I know who Heidi and Spencer are, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are, or will be, in hell. )
My first reaction is not to panic, which for me involves this breathing exercise that I learned in yoga where you press one nostril closed with your thumb and breathe in the other nostril and then release the thumbed down nostril and exhale out of it while shutting the just breathed in nostril with a different finger. And then switch. It’s sort of like the breathing version of the pirate patch. What? John told me that pirates wear a patch over one eye so that when there’s an attack, they can whip it off and voila! They have night vision. If this isn’t true, I will kill him and sell his organs. Or do an organ giveaway on my blog. Hey, my blogaversary is coming up, after all.
Anyway. Back to me.
So I’m doing this exercise and it’s relaxing me but it is the Opposite of Relaxing everyone else on the train because I am stealing their oxygen and generally look insane.
And an announcement comes on saying that there are heavy delays because of signal trouble, which is clearly code for “you will all be dead soon, but we don’t want to tell you because then you will panic”.
Everyone else in the subway car looks not panicked at all. Because they are stupid and don’t realize that we are dying. I see that I’m going to have to be the brains of this morning commute.
One part of me thinks that I should tell my fellow passengers what’s really going on, the other part of me thinks that I should let them enjoy their remaining few moments on earth and yet a third part of realizes that I have sealed my right nostril with my thumb and have been breathing in and out exclusively out of my left nostril in direct contravention of the yoga protocol and sanitary breathing practices. As I start to hyperventilate over this latest development, the train starts to move. I am liberated.
I milk the story of my heroism for the rest of the day.
Then I pick up my son from school. I am ready to share.
“Guess what happened on the subway today?” I ask him.
“There was a snake!” he says.
“No.”
“Someone threw up?”
“No, I was stuck on the train!” I pronounce. He looks disappointed. I’m thinking of adding “with a vomiting snake” but he has the hugest mouth and will tell everyone.
“I was stuck for a really long time,” I say, trying to regain the momentum in my mind. “Guess how long?”
“Ten hours?”
An aside: Over the summer, we are doing some intense math shit. So that when I drop him off at school at 9 am and pick him up at 4 pm, he doesn’t guess “8 hours”.
“No.. twenty minutes.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes,”
“Did anyone poop?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
Moral: Don’t get stuck on the subway. And if you do, make sure there’s a snake there.
One year ago ...
- Dinner Guest - 2010