Bleeding Fiction

One day, I'm going to write a short story with the above title. No clue what it'll be about yet, but given the long, long list of projects I already know about that I have ahead of it I've got plenty of time to figure it out.

That said, I buy a monthly rail pass to ride the NJ Transit train from Plauderville Road in Garfield to Hoboken. This is the substantial portion of my commute and it's nice to be able to show the conductor a little yellow card with a three-letter abbreviation of the month on it rather than having to buy and hand over a new ticket every day. Plus it's cheaper.

The colors on the little card don't change from month to month, though, and the conductors all seem to be illiterate. I spent the entire month of March using my February rail pass. In 46 trips on the train, only twice did a conductor ask me for my March pass.

I've got an April pass, though I continue to use the February one. I think I'll give it a run through this month, too. If I don't get asked to see my April rail pass more than twice, then shit, I'm just not going to buy a rail pass in May. I mean, at that point why bother?

More fun from Bekah. I post this only because of my result, which I found funny and appropriate:

You're New Jersey!
You don't just live in the suburbs, you define the culture of all Surburbia. You drive everywhere you go, love to eat at diners, and pretend to have a garden. While everyone knows that your house was built on a toxic waste dump, you do your best to hide this information and keep referring to those mythical gardens. Driving on a road without paying for it was a revolutionary experience you once had that you still think about all the time. You owe the Mafia so many favors that you're thinking of renaming yourself Sicily.
Take the State Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

In the shower this morning it occurred to me that the water here in Seattle doesn't seem as wet as the water in New Jersey. I've got a harder time rinsing shampoo and conditioner out of my hair here than I do in the East Coast.

Of course as I thought about that I also thought about the way my mail, which had been outside for two weeks with only the mailbox for protection while I was away, was soaked when I picked it up. So maybe it's just the water coming out of the shower. I can't remember if I've had similar reaction to any of the other showers I've used in the area.

Maybe I should just shower in the rain from now on.

I've been kicking this around in my head for a little while, but I didn't settle on it until I saw Rick tonight. Rick's a friend of The Delightful Jeni Garber's and, much like me, a kid from Jersey. I've hung with him a few times before, but I haven't seen him in, well, I imagine it's quite literally been a decade. I saw him tonight, we shook hands. We parted ways at the end of the night, we shook hands.

Some folks are going to understand what I mean when I say that this is normal. It's just part of Jersey culture, I guess. You shake hands. And not just with guys you haven't seen in a while or you're just meeting. You show up at the diner to hang with your friends, as you do every single night, you make the rounds and shake hands, and you do the same when you part ways at the end of the night. It's a cultural cue, I think; a quick and easy bonding exercise, or an act of finality. When you shake hands, you know that something's started or something's ended.

Steeped in a handshake culture, I've imposed it on other people, who are not always used to it. I did it in Syracuse, with most of the folks there, and Mr. Proctor still looks at me funny whenever I shake hands with him. But, I dunno, it doesn't always happen. I went up to visit Derek. No handshake. I didn't even think of it until later, when I realized that here in Seattle, handshakes just don't happen. I've got the guys I hang with. No handshakes. I bump into the guys from my program every now and then. No handshakes.

Now, I'm the big traveller here; no slouch I in the cultural awareness department. I've got friends of the European persuasian that I'll greet and part from with a hug and a kiss, and some friends stateside that get the same treatment. I've been unable to end conversations with Australians without the word "cheers" being involved. Everyone has their cues.

But I've been noticing a lack of any of those cues in my interactions with people lately, and as a kid from Jersey, where the handshake is so much the done thing that reaching for one is smooth as silk, it's been a little odd. It'd been tickling my brain lately, but it wasn't until I saw Rick tonight that it clicked into place. It's like no conversation or get-together I've had since I got out here has actually ever begun or ended. And that's just a little wiggy to think about.

Yesterday I got an email from Eugene, announcing his annual birthday barbecue. In North Jersey my friends and I have a barbecue season; every few weeks we get together for a barbecue. We've had as few as two to as many as six over the course of a season. It's a good time, sitting with good, old friends on a relaxing afternoon outside, enjoying good grilled food and some drinks... Maybe playing a little football, which might involve accidentally knocking Adi to the ground... I think of the start of the season as Eugene's birthday barbecue. Getting Eugene's email, I had one of those homesick moments that happen whenever I miss something important to me. It's what happens when you move far away from the friends you love.

Around the time I got the email, though, I also found the website Overheard in New York. It's impossible, in New York, not to touch on other people's lives. You ignore each other with blithe abandon as you walk down the street, but things are cramped enough that parts of people, snippets of their conversation, drift into your personal plane of reality and help make up your world. If New York is a microcosm for the world (and it just might be), then New York, and through New York this website, is a reminder that distant things might not be so far away. I read a lot of the site's archive yesterday, and I laughed a lot at what's up there, and when I stopped, I stopped with a sigh and thought "it's good to be home."

I love New Jersey (I say as I listen to Bruce Springsteen on my stereo), but sometimes my natal state has... issues. Current issue is the state slogan. "Come See For Yourself." What the fuck? I'm glad I left before they changed over to that shit.

Only now I live in Washington, which has adopted a slogan even more stupid than New Jersey's: SayWA?

At this point I'd normally make a snarky comment wishing people dead, but I think it'd be in rather poor taste just now, considering.

There's a quote from Sandman that goes "the price of getting what you want is getting what once you wanted." So true, so true.

While I lived in Seattle I'd whine about how Thanksgiving was the one day a year I liked to spend with my family, and how sad I was that I couldn't do that.

Now that I'm back on the east coast and sitting in my parents' living room on the day itself, I can think of maybe three other places I'd rather be.

It was nice to see everyone, don't get me wrong, but the reasons Thanksgiving-with-the-family was so important to me are sort of... gone. I've shifted priorities. I've moved on. I've known that for a few months, I guess; I was comfortably making alternate Thanksgiving plans for next year back in July. But today really drove the point home.

Honestly, it feels a little weird, but also pretty liberating.