I have a new job, and have for the last forty days, helping faculty in Drexel’s School of Public Health write and submit their grants, keep their grant budgets straight, report on their research when it’s over. It’s rewarding and…
Category: Strangers on a Train
Handwriting Analysis (or: the Role of Coincidence?)
It’s been a rough couple days in the northeast. People say things like that which they have no business saying. Most people in the northeast have probably been doing just fine. There’s preparations for what appears to be the northeast’s…
Tuesday’s Alive
“It’s because you’re not trying to be happy or wondering why you should have been made unhappy, because you’ve stopped thinking in terms of happiness or unhappiness. That’s the enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation,” Mrs. Quarles…
Mack Truck Time and Other Myths
So I wrote the post earlier today and took a shower and got dressed and walked up to my train, my mind awash with thoughts of the workday to come, Emily’s offer, the parts of my teeth I would soon…
Watching the Watchers
Yes, it’s another BART vignette. I got on the train this morning and sat towards the back, cracking a brand new massive tome, my Christmas treat The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. Please note the title here –…
Cleanup on Aisle 6
Coming up from the train this morning, I walked my usual path through Powell Street Station, winding to the right and up the mini-escalator to a little landing before the second mini-escalator. On said landing were two orange cones, pretty…
Collapse
There’s this great scene in a recent great movie (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) about timing and the house-of-cards nature of our worlds. One thing bounces just the wrong way, leading to another thing bouncing just the wrong way,…
Western Civilization
On the train ride into work this morning, I wasn’t able to get a seat. The train was running just late enough to pick up enough stragglers to sell all the seats just before Downtown Berkeley. I had to stand…
Postcards of the Hanging
Yes, I received your letter yesterday about the time the doorknob broke. When you asked me how I was doing was that some kind of joke? Late afternoon rushing down the steps for the train whose destination I can only…
Did I Miss a Memo?
No one came in to San Francisco today. The train felt almost post-apocalyptic. Of course not a real apocalypse. How could the trains still be running after a real apocalypse? And there would be no others aboard rather than the…