{"id":493,"date":"2009-03-16T05:58:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-16T13:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/493"},"modified":"2009-03-16T06:01:06","modified_gmt":"2009-03-16T14:01:06","slug":"when-the-commute-goes-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/archives\/493","title":{"rendered":"When the Commute Goes Bad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m riding BART and worried about getting all my things off the train so I can go into work.  I have with me my backpack, a jacket, Emily&#8217;s laptop (out of its bag), and a large piece of luggage in the center aisle.  I&#8217;m in the window seat and at one stop that I&#8217;m worried is mine, the person next to me leaves.<\/p>\n<p>I get up to start gathering my things, including the luggage.  When I turn back around, a very portly gentleman has sat in the recently vacated seat next to my collected stuff.  The jacket, backpack, and laptop are next to him.  There&#8217;s really no way to reach my stuff, so I have to ask him to get up briefly so I can gather my things, but he seems very bent out of shape about this and grumbles while he stumbles out of the seat.<\/p>\n<p>Suddenly I realize it&#8217;s my stop and have to grab everything hurriedly and rush (ambling under the weight of all the stuff) to the doors.  Just as I set foot on the platform, I realize Emily&#8217;s laptop is out of its bag and I have to retrieve the bag.  I run back into the train car, grab the first laptop bag I see, and run back to the doors.  The doors start closing in front of me, but I stick the laptop bag between them, the doors jam, reopen, and I stuff myself through them.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m standing on the platform of Macarthur BART when I realize that the laptop bag in my hand is blue and isn&#8217;t mine (or Emily&#8217;s).  The train is pulling away with the actual bag, while I have someone else&#8217;s.  I wonder briefly whether it will even matter that much, but I soon realize that Emily&#8217;s actual bag is much nicer and probably has some of her other things in it.<\/p>\n<p>I start trudging down the steps of Macarthur BART and out toward a nondescript part of town when a couple of not unfriendly police start gently ferrying me toward a gargantuan police station that looks like a very nice high school\/courthouse combination.  I&#8217;m vaguely ushered without actually being escorted and suddenly my shoes are gone.  The police ask what I&#8217;m doing with that bag and I can&#8217;t tell whether the implication is that I&#8217;ve stolen it or that I shouldn&#8217;t have jammed the BART doors with it.  I&#8217;m wary of telling them too much, but they ask me to go see someone in the office.  I look at the office doors and they&#8217;re clearly the well-guarded entrance to the cells in the basement and I look back and say &#8220;No one intelligent would go in there voluntarily.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>They smile and do nothing to compel me, so I start subtly half-running for the exit, seemingly content to leave all my stuff behind for the time being.  As I get outside, there&#8217;s a rolling lawn that&#8217;s even more school than courthouse and I think they&#8217;re going to let me go (albeit in sock-feet), when suddenly a casually dressed man emerges from the courthouse and then is suddenly ahead of me inexplicably.  He starts launching a small remote-control helicopter and flying it in my direction.  He is making lots of jokes that seem somewhere between good-natured and sinister and I catch the first helicopter and break it in half, flinging it aside.  I feel enraged by these helicopters and I want to send a message.  He sends three more helicopters my way, each meeting a similar fate before I wake up.<\/p>\n<p>If nothing else, I think my subconscious wants me to realize that I have too much stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m riding BART and worried about getting all my things off the train so I can go into work. I have with me my backpack, a jacket, Emily&#8217;s laptop (out of its bag), and a large piece of luggage in the center aisle. I&#8217;m in the window seat and at one stop that I&#8217;m worried [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,28],"tags":[5,68],"class_list":["post-493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-day-in-the-life","category-what-dreams-may-come","tag-a-day-in-the-life","tag-what-dreams-may-come"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bluepyramid.org\/storey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}