08.24.23
I get kicked off the A Train at 168th Street at 12:20am on a Thursday morning (Wednesday night, if you’re not annoying).
An MTA employee yells into the open doors of the stationary train, barely permeating my noise cancelling headphones like a Charlie Brown authority figure. I turn off noise cancellation just in time to hear two conductors, simultaneously over the loudspeakers, say that we need to go to the downtown platform to catch the uptown trains that are running between 168th and 207th. I didn’t really deduce this from the overlapping underground psychobabble that was pumped into the train, but I followed the crowd of people mumbling, “I just want to get home!”
We, the other uptowners and I (united front!), move over to the downtown platform and wait for the train marked “Shuttle” to open its doors. One man asks another if this is how he gets uptown.
“I think so,” says the question recipient. “I have no idea what’s really going on. And they just raised this shit to $2.90!” I snort laugh and he smiles at me.
Sitting on the shuttle train at 168th for several minutes, they announce (one person at a time this time — how revelatory!) three times that this train will be going back uptown, from whence it came, if you need downtown service, get on the train across the platform. This train will be going uptown but right now it sits, stagnant and rumbling loudly, on the downtown express platform. This train is going uptown — okay, show don’t tell, babe!
The train moves slowly out of 168th and does not pick up speed over its short journey. The doors take forever to open at 175th and the people seated around me and I giggle and shake our heads and make comments about how fucking stupid this is. I paid nearly three dollars for this! I could buy, like, one and a half bodega Diet Cokes with that!
Finally, we arrive at Dyckman, a little turned around because we arrived on the downtown platform. I finally figure out where I am, which exit to wander out of, which direction I am walking, and go to the grocery store because it’s twenty-four hours and I don’t have any milk for my coffee tomorrow morning. Recently, all of my late night trips to the grocery store have been ill-advised, both financially and nutritionally, purchases of some upsetting combination of ice cream, mac and cheese, chips, cereal, and some vegetable I don’t need that I will most likely end up throwing away later in the week, a futile attempt to offset the toddler-horror I am laying on the checkout conveyor belt at 2 in the morning. But today, I am purchasing milk, coffee, greek yogurt, honey, and a bag of spring mix greens, so for the first time ever, I am doling to the overnight shift people, who know me and wave to me when I come in, the impression that I have, against all odds, ingested a vitamin at least a few times in my life.
Okay, I lied — I did also get a single serve thing of Lucky Charms. I am only human! And I would like a little snack for when I needlessly stay up much later than I need to watching Vanderpump Rules (I got to season 10 recently after a full-series watch and oh my God, etc.). There is something to be said about how all of the foods I gravitate toward during my late-night and shame-addled grocery store romps are things I ate more often as a child, but I don’t have enough time or master’s degrees to dissect that. I do know that I think most people in my age group would probably say they haven’t had cereals in the Lucky Charms family in years, decades even. Do you remember that commercial for Lucky Charms that was targeted at adults? The image that stuck in my mind was a woman standing in her kitchen saying, “I forgot how good these taste.” I understand the angle of the marketing but I cannot relate to it, because at any given time it is more likely than not that less than sixty days have elapsed since I last had Lucky Charms.
I put my headphones back in on the corner waiting for the light to change, walking back to my apartment. My mom sent me her AirPods because I left my case on the Amtrak coming back from visiting my family two weeks ago (you know, like a moron who should not be afforded the privilege of a seat back pocket), and she never used them. I continue my Taylor-Swift-complete-discography-shuffle without concern about sudden and jarring crackling and/or spontaneous combustion so dramatically dangled over me by the mostly-broken wired headphones that I’ve been using for the last couple of weeks. Kay, Sara, Ava, and I talked extensively about Taylor Swift over drinks after Kay’s wonderful improv show tonight — I was inspired by these cool ladies, who are significantly more familiar with the full texts of Taylor Swift than I am, to dive back in and see about those songs I don’t necessarily know off the dome. Have you guys heard about this? This Taylor Swift? She’s onto something… Sara, Ava, and I worked our way through Taylor’s albums, each picking out our definitive favorite song on each (not always an easy task!), while riding out the midday heat at the Gaylord Opryland resort when we went to Nashville last summer. Ava fished the note out of her phone where we wrote it all down last year, recapping our favorites, seeing if we stand by it all, and getting Kay’s favorites from each album, too. Midnights has since been released, so we all decided our favorites on there, too — mine was “You’re On Your Own, Kid.”
I get back to my apartment to the tune of “Jump Then Fall (Taylor’s Version),” which Kay labeled as her favorite from Fearless, and set down my groceries on my Facebook Marketplace kitchen island.
I take off my rings and the hoop earrings that I’m trying to convince myself I can pull off, and find via glance in the mirror that my bangs (or… Are we still using the term “side bangs” in 2023? If so, that’s more appropriate here), tucked behind my ears, have flipped outward in an unsavory way. I wash my face, because if I don’t do it now, I will go to bed later without doing it at all — the result of one of those moments where I say to my therapist, “I keep staying up so late because I don’t want to do all my little before-bed tasks,” and she’s like, “Do you have to wait until right before you go to bed to wash your face?” And then I give her a hundred dollars.
I eat my Lucky Charms on the couch and watch a few too many hours of Vanderpump (hours! It was 1am when I got home! It’s a WEDNESDAY night! WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME!). Eventually, I force myself to exhaustedly stumble to bed, neglecting to wash the dishes in my sink, including the carafe and pieces of my coffeemaker, which I went to the grocery store specifically to be able to use tomorrow morning.
