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I observed/experienced some rather strange things today on the 7:58 Purple Line to the Loop. Most mornings I am only too happy to get on the train. I'm already listening to either Justin Timberlake or the London Philharmonic Orchestra (no joke), so I typically feel good about settling down to people-watch, eat my yogurt, and listen to music. Today I was tired though. I barely got through the train doors before they closed, stumbled over to my seat, flopped down quite noisily, and began to quiet myself down again. The morning is often punctuated by intense periods of stress, followed by stretches of boredom. I was just drifting off to sleep when a man on the train came up behind me and hit me in the head with his paper. OK. I guess that's hyperbole. He brushed me with his paper, but he very obviously awoke me. I wanted to be all like "Don't be brushin' me wit yo newspaper at 8 o'clock in the mornin'. Ain't you got no sense?" (He was white, so I felt that this might have taken him aback.) Fortunately, I was able to let it go and fall back asleep.

At Fullerton, however, I was roused once again, this time by the sound of yelling. The train was packed already, and the large crowd waiting on the platform at that stop didn't help matters. I guess a man and woman from said crowd were both attempting to claim the same tiny, one-person space left in the front of my car. The man made it, and the woman didn't. I don't exactly know what happened to make it so. The woman wasn't giving up, however. Passengers could hear the train doors trying to close, over and over, as the woman yelled at the man, accusing him of pushing her out of the way. Instead of being gracious, the man took an attitude and tone of superiority, refused to allow her into the train, and yelled, "Hey look, call the police. Don't make accusations." Other passengers exonerated him once the doors closed and the train moved on. All the white people unite together to defend the man's right to speak to the loud black woman in such a way. But the people seated around me were quiet; from my perspective, the tensions were racially charged, both the woman against the man, and vice versa. I doubt either of them intended them to be so, or even realized it, but I'm surmising that the woman was feeling a sense of oppression, and the man, a realization of power, superiority over, as if they were tapping into parts and lines that have been written for them previously in our country's long and complex history of racial tensions. But I'm going much too far in my narrative. I was only intending to describe the encounter. Onto something a bit lighter:

Because I wasn't really able to sleep after the commotion, I pulled out of copy of StreetWise from my bag and began perusing it. As I looked up, I saw a young guy looking at me from across the train. And then, he winked at me. I became rather embarrassed and immediately became fixated on my paper. How rude, I thought. How awkward, I thought. What is the point of doing that? I wondered. A few minutes later, I looked again, only to discover that said winking man actually had some kind of facial tic that looked like a genuine wink. I almost burst out laughing, wished that he was close enough so that I could share the joke. "Tsk, tsk" to my own vanity, I say.