This has been a weekend of transit snafus:
1. On Thursday, en route from work to a showcase by State of Shock at the Mercury Lounge, I was almost hit by a bicyclist while getting out of a cab, and she maybe got hurt a little because she had to break so fast and the bike kind of tipped over and he hoe fell off so I felt bad and apologized but what I mostly felt bad for (she was, after all, being something of a moron trying to bike through a red light and squeeze between a cab and the curb) was that she looked at me like I was the source of all global pollution because I was taking a cab and not biking myself, and this is something you'd feel bad about if you were reading Thomas Friedman's new book, which I am (see below).
2. Going to Penn State is a source of enormous anxiety because there's only one bus on Friday night and none on Saturday so if you miss it (or so you'll think when it's running late and you begin to wonder if you've missed it by waiting in the same spot since no one seems to know where you ought to be waiting or have heard of the bus company in question) you'll have to either pay another $50+ to take an Amtrak train the next morning or give up the whole trip as a loss, since even arriving at 1am Friday night I felt like I spent nearly as much time in transit as I did conscious in State College, Pa.
3. Not so much a snafu, but I'm currently on the 4+ hour Fullington trailways bus back from State College and I got pretty sick of trying to read Thomas Friedman's new "Hot, Flat and Crowded" (bored precisely because I agree with his general views and several of his specific ones and so read his editorials twice a week when I'm boed at work and, as such, am already more or less familiar with the whole thesis of his book [the main excitement thusfar being the I-guess-predictable but nonetheless surprising quote from an exes' father on biodiversity loss]) so I turned on the wireless on my Kindle only to find that I had downloaded an e-book (or e-article? e-version-of-the-original-uncut-article?) by David Forste Wallace about following John McCain as a journalist on the campaign trail. The book/article/whatever is of course characteristically delightful and insightful and timely to boot since McCain is once again on the campaign trail, and as such more-than-characteristically devastating because Wallace killed himself so it's maybe more or less the last new thing of his I'll get to read.
4. So in my delight, I decide to pretend to be a campaign journalist myself and edit my most recent article for Performer on the bus and instantly encounter what Wallace describes as the scourge of laptop journalists -- natural light glare from the windows -- and I only even think to pull down the shade, which kind of doesn't help, because I'm reading the article in the first place.