![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
1. I've made a routine out of my commutes in the morning and evening. I have the good fortune to be located along the BART line at stations where I can generally get a seat going both ways; even during the morning rush, when by Oakland the trains are packed full, standing-room-only, I'm generally tucked into a seat by a window where the morning light (when there is morning light, rather than drifting fog or steady rain) can pour in on me. These days, when I've managed my energy well enough that I'm not completely exhausted, too tired to think, I read. It's a 45-minute ride each way, which clears out a precious hour and a half for me to sit down and devour books. Which is an unparalleled luxury, given how little I was able to read before I came out here.
For the past few days, it's been Craig Child's lyrical collection of personal essays The Animal Dialogues, which recount the author's various journeys into wild spaces, sometimes singly, sometimes with others, and his encounters with animals in those habitats.
This morning I got an unexpected accompaniment in the form of a man who got on a stop or two after me, settled down on the side-facing seats next to the doors, brought out a fiddle, and began to play.
I didn't recognize the song. There were passages that reminded me of Ode to Joy, but the song clearly wasn't it. It felt a little folk-y, a little familiar, as though it had been embedded in some latent awareness of a communal history. One of those songs or myths or historical stories everyone seems to know of, even if they have no particular emotional connection to it.
I'd slept in this morning, having forgotten to re-set my alarm after turning it off last Thursday so I could come in late on Friday. I'd been up half the night trying to straighten out things at work. I'm in the habit of taking the same train every day: leave at 8:05, get to the station 7 minutes before it arrives. Clockwork. But because habits slip, I knew the schedule of the direct trains in, or rather the schedule of when I should leave to catch them. So I woke up, checked the time, did the calculation, and took the train that would give me the time to dress, grab a bite to eat, and leave the house without any hurry.
Sometimes, the time I leave conspires to give me little presents: glimpses of some transitory phenomenon that seems hidden in the folds between one hour and the next. A fog thick enough to hide the end of the block, which will burn off in a half-hour. A flock of crows on their rounds, putting the world in order. (In the midwest, I fell in love with crows because they stayed through the winter, when most other life went to warmer climates or went to ground. Every spring and autumn they'd seem especially busy, as though inspecting the world to make sure everything was squared away for the falling-asleep or waking-up of the earth. I wonder what their duties consist of, here, when winter is agnostic about whether it wants to drive the soil into growth with copious rains, or turn the leaves and nip the buds with slight edges of frost. I've only seen the frost once, here, but any of the trees are bare.) Logically, I know that any given time will have its own phenomena; logically, I know that my mind attributes more significance to single instances of noticing something that long swathes of not. But I choose to interpret these as the universe's little gifts to me, because it makes my life brighter, and because it has a certain emotional truth to it.
I've had unexpected music on BART a few times. The other times were a husband and wife who wandered up and down the train, playing their accordion and collecting donations; on-BART busking, I suppose. I normally get very annoyed at people treating BART and its captive audience as though it was their personal space; people whose music blares out of their headphones, people who eat and make a mess on the carpeting. There are certain rules of inhabiting BART as a public space. They're flexible and sometimes ignored outright, but you can feel that most people fit themselves into them. Occupy only one seat, and get up when someone needs to move past you. Don't commandeer the shared silence. But both of these times, the music felt like something unexpected and wonderful, and, so far as I could tell, no one complained.
2. BART is a chaotic system, with order veneered on top of it. Occasionally the veneer is ruptured and you can see the nature of things underneath: machines which do not always run to specifications, human intelligence and agency trying desperately to keep the whole thing, metaphorically or literally, on its tracks.
I left work early-ish today, just a shade after 5. I boarded the train that would take me directly home, as was habit; I got a window seat, as was habit. The train went too stations, and then stopped, and did not move.
We sat for fifteen minutes or so with the train operator telling us that there was a train ahead, stuck in the transbay tube. After fifteen minutes, rather than starting, the train went out of service and disgorged us into the crowded Embarcadero station.
There's only one way for BART trains to come from the East Bay into the city and peninsula. One tunnel, two tracks, and the eastbound track was shut down at the peak of rush hour. The entire station was shoulder-to-shoulder with people, unsure what was going on. Parcels of information were doled out by the speakers, directing us to one platform for a train or two who squeaked through, east-bound, on the hastily-cleared westbound track; parcels of information moved from mouth to mouth as new people came in and the station attendant urged them not to. Then the train was cleared and east-bound trains started moving again, coming through their correct platform, carrying backlogs of people crammed in like sardines.
The triumph of the day was that I kept myself calm. Amused at the situation. What could you do? The train is delayed, and being miserable or angry won't help it along. It will, however, make you miserable and angry.
2012 was a year in which I learned that things are not certain or stable. I'll likely continue to learn that lesson. Adaptability and resilience are better things to have than stable ground, at times, because stable ground is illusory and will only become more so. I could not have predicted the shape of my life now, fifteen years ago. Or ten, or two. Every hypothesis I have changes. Even the givens change. If you can laugh to yourself while people in the crowd frown, if you can keep calm while others curse happenstance, that's something, at least.
It's a moving target. Everything is. And sometimes, just sometimes, I can hit it.
For the past few days, it's been Craig Child's lyrical collection of personal essays The Animal Dialogues, which recount the author's various journeys into wild spaces, sometimes singly, sometimes with others, and his encounters with animals in those habitats.
This morning I got an unexpected accompaniment in the form of a man who got on a stop or two after me, settled down on the side-facing seats next to the doors, brought out a fiddle, and began to play.
I didn't recognize the song. There were passages that reminded me of Ode to Joy, but the song clearly wasn't it. It felt a little folk-y, a little familiar, as though it had been embedded in some latent awareness of a communal history. One of those songs or myths or historical stories everyone seems to know of, even if they have no particular emotional connection to it.
I'd slept in this morning, having forgotten to re-set my alarm after turning it off last Thursday so I could come in late on Friday. I'd been up half the night trying to straighten out things at work. I'm in the habit of taking the same train every day: leave at 8:05, get to the station 7 minutes before it arrives. Clockwork. But because habits slip, I knew the schedule of the direct trains in, or rather the schedule of when I should leave to catch them. So I woke up, checked the time, did the calculation, and took the train that would give me the time to dress, grab a bite to eat, and leave the house without any hurry.
Sometimes, the time I leave conspires to give me little presents: glimpses of some transitory phenomenon that seems hidden in the folds between one hour and the next. A fog thick enough to hide the end of the block, which will burn off in a half-hour. A flock of crows on their rounds, putting the world in order. (In the midwest, I fell in love with crows because they stayed through the winter, when most other life went to warmer climates or went to ground. Every spring and autumn they'd seem especially busy, as though inspecting the world to make sure everything was squared away for the falling-asleep or waking-up of the earth. I wonder what their duties consist of, here, when winter is agnostic about whether it wants to drive the soil into growth with copious rains, or turn the leaves and nip the buds with slight edges of frost. I've only seen the frost once, here, but any of the trees are bare.) Logically, I know that any given time will have its own phenomena; logically, I know that my mind attributes more significance to single instances of noticing something that long swathes of not. But I choose to interpret these as the universe's little gifts to me, because it makes my life brighter, and because it has a certain emotional truth to it.
I've had unexpected music on BART a few times. The other times were a husband and wife who wandered up and down the train, playing their accordion and collecting donations; on-BART busking, I suppose. I normally get very annoyed at people treating BART and its captive audience as though it was their personal space; people whose music blares out of their headphones, people who eat and make a mess on the carpeting. There are certain rules of inhabiting BART as a public space. They're flexible and sometimes ignored outright, but you can feel that most people fit themselves into them. Occupy only one seat, and get up when someone needs to move past you. Don't commandeer the shared silence. But both of these times, the music felt like something unexpected and wonderful, and, so far as I could tell, no one complained.
2. BART is a chaotic system, with order veneered on top of it. Occasionally the veneer is ruptured and you can see the nature of things underneath: machines which do not always run to specifications, human intelligence and agency trying desperately to keep the whole thing, metaphorically or literally, on its tracks.
I left work early-ish today, just a shade after 5. I boarded the train that would take me directly home, as was habit; I got a window seat, as was habit. The train went too stations, and then stopped, and did not move.
We sat for fifteen minutes or so with the train operator telling us that there was a train ahead, stuck in the transbay tube. After fifteen minutes, rather than starting, the train went out of service and disgorged us into the crowded Embarcadero station.
There's only one way for BART trains to come from the East Bay into the city and peninsula. One tunnel, two tracks, and the eastbound track was shut down at the peak of rush hour. The entire station was shoulder-to-shoulder with people, unsure what was going on. Parcels of information were doled out by the speakers, directing us to one platform for a train or two who squeaked through, east-bound, on the hastily-cleared westbound track; parcels of information moved from mouth to mouth as new people came in and the station attendant urged them not to. Then the train was cleared and east-bound trains started moving again, coming through their correct platform, carrying backlogs of people crammed in like sardines.
The triumph of the day was that I kept myself calm. Amused at the situation. What could you do? The train is delayed, and being miserable or angry won't help it along. It will, however, make you miserable and angry.
2012 was a year in which I learned that things are not certain or stable. I'll likely continue to learn that lesson. Adaptability and resilience are better things to have than stable ground, at times, because stable ground is illusory and will only become more so. I could not have predicted the shape of my life now, fifteen years ago. Or ten, or two. Every hypothesis I have changes. Even the givens change. If you can laugh to yourself while people in the crowd frown, if you can keep calm while others curse happenstance, that's something, at least.
It's a moving target. Everything is. And sometimes, just sometimes, I can hit it.
Tags:
- *(not) hiding under things,
- *greek-style apologia,
- *like st. francis you rise?,
- *movin'... on,
- *there is no plan,
- *this song's for you,
- entry: essaything,
- entry: musings,
- entry: rambledansen,
- life: general,
- life: grownup stuff,
- life: major life changes,
- life: path,
- stuff: curiosities,
- stuff: life updates,
- topic: bay area,
- topic: life & lessons therein,
- topic: philosophy,
- topic: world
no subject
Date: 2013-01-08 05:49 pm (UTC)From:Work that was actually close enough that sometimes I walked. It was a long walk, but it was doable. ...and the bus ride still took an hour (two bus rides, actually). Anyway, LA's transit system is dumb. But the down-time, the time inside my head, was wonderful. Even if I didn't read every single go, sometimes I just drank my coffee and looked out the window, I still got a lot more literature down than I am these days. Which is a thing I feel bad about, especially in an authorial sense. :(
no subject
Date: 2013-01-08 05:59 pm (UTC)From:I do find that I'd really missed reading. I've also chained a spot of reading time to my go-to-bed routine, and I'm working through a giant nonfiction book -- American Prometheus -- that Thief got me forever ago and I started reading and then fell out of because I never had the time for reading. And, yeah, it's taking me forever to get through it, because I only read a section or a few sections a day, but I'm getting through it. Which feels great.
(Also, Oppenheimer. ♥, basically.)
no subject
Date: 2013-01-08 06:15 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-01-08 08:27 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-01-08 10:21 pm (UTC)From:Mm, I feel like there's a difference between people who treat that space and those in it without consideration and those who deliberately give to that space and the people in it. I mean, buskers want to take your money, I suppose, and I could see how it could become annoying, but I feel like there's still something inherently special in creating and then sharing.
Also what Baco said. <3
no subject
Date: 2013-01-09 09:28 pm (UTC)From:But inside the station, people are always on their way in or on their way out. The buskers there get passed by. Up the stairs, in the commons, near the cable-car turnaround, there are frequently a couple dancers who attract crowds; they're showpeople, and can often get people from their audience in to dance, too. There's that atmosphere of milling, there, that isn't present in the station.
And in the traincar, both the people I heard playing were technically proficient. And the atmosphere of a traincar is an atmosphere of sitting -- standing, if there's no room -- still. Waiting. And that shared, communal music is surprising; almost serendipitous.