Subway rumblings

On the R train there was one seat available on the aisle and I was wondering why no one was sitting down, until I approached and saw someone had spilled something. It wasn't a huge mess, though, so I pulled out a napkin, covered the splotch and took the seat. At Lexington, the guy in the inside seat left so I moved over, leaving the napkin in place. Soon a lady just getting on the train came over to sit down. Thinking that the napkin was just trash left over by someone, she impatiently knocked it onto the floor. Seeing the surprise underneath, she sighed, then quickly scurried away. Glad it wasn't me. And how easily it could have been me.

The overly loud i-Pod noise was getting to me, so I turned my own i-Pod on for peace of mind. Dar Williams was up, the song "Iowa." Funny how over the weekend I just saw a musical about Iowa ("The Music Man"). You can find poignancy is everything if you want to. I was in this mood on Sunday where -- even though I've probably seen this show 30 times -- I was excited, just waiting for the point where salesman Harold Hill tells Marian the librarian, "For the first time in my life I got my foot stuck in the door."

Taking a chance, changing something, doing something different before it's too late -- oddly, this is also what the Dar Williams song "Iowa" is about, and is probably why it's one of her most popular songs at shows. The line goes, "I went running through the screendoors of discretion for I woke up from a nightmare that I could not stand to see... you were wandering out on the hills of Iowa and you were not thinking of me..."

Of course I want to know someone is thinking about me.

Do I take chances? Some. Sure, lots of physical boundary pushing, but emotional? Hardly. I want to be done with getting hurt and being a fool, and so I try to avoid that high school bullshit at all costs. Which of course is bullshit in itself. We all, I think, have our passions and desires, and they crop up and they usually are "inappropriate" so we shove them back down again. Unimportant. Childish. Selfish.