Artificial Cheese

One of the joys of airports and train stations is the abundance of people who are begging to be judged and analyzed. I had an hour long delay at Penn Station waiting for the “Vermonter” from Amtrak to take me to Union Station in DC.

For the duration of this wait, I stood in the area between the 8th St. exits that contains the giant board which displays arrivals and departures. There were a few moments when I considered wandering around Penn Station during the delay, but the types of people waiting with me kept me glued to the crowd. It started with the tiny Indian family.

Tiny Indian Family

 

It was a standard sized Indian family. One mother, one father, one daughter, one son. Each one grabbing their ticket as if it were the key to happiness in their giant imposing world of inadequacy. The father led the pack, with each member of the family following in decending order of dominance. The most distinguishing factor about them was that each member in the family was 4-5 inches shorter than anyone else in the room.

I didn’t even notice them until they were right under my chin. The mother was peering through the trees of people calling out track numbers in Gujrati while the father ignored her, and the elder sister was screaming at the younger brother to keep his hand out of his mouth as the drooly-fisted brother looked up and around in amazement. As they passed by like a tiny little freight train, they were suddenly stopped by a white woman who stepped right in their path while on a cell phone, saying loudly, “If someone died, I wouldn’t want to know. I wouldn’t …even want to know.” The entire family stopped and stared for a brief moment of judgement before they were off again.

Around and under the crowd, I tracked their movements based on the bending of the crowd like dogs in a wheat field. They made their way to the opposite end of the giant room and out through the 8th Ave and 31st St. exit. Judging by my encounter with them, that is not where they wanted to go; but it might have been the best thing for everyone.

The Stud, Captain Obvious, and the Two Confused Blondes

 

A few minutes after the Indian family cleared the man-maze to freedom, two average slightly overweight New York guys in their early 40s approach and setup a standing camp beside me. The greyer of the two men, Captain Obvious, begins to speak to the Stud.

Persistently, Captain Obvious continues to find something obvious to talk about until the Stud stops answering. At this point, a young blonde woman in front of us, wearing a short skirt, begins to do stretches to loosen up her inner-thigh muscles. Everyone stops talking. Women look angry, men’s mouths are suddenly unable to close, and me thinking how I can make it into a blog entry.

Eventually the stretching stopped and everyone resumed their normal activities. Captain Obvious starts up once again, but this time with an action item.

Captain Obvious leaves behind his verbally battered companion and makes his way through the crowd to the book store. The young streching blonde begins to look back towards the Stud for short moments of time and then stops. Its quite distinct but the Stud doesn’t notice.

A moment later another young blonde begins making her way towards us from about 20 feet away in a crowded room. She must have passed 20-30 people to get to where we were, only to turn to the Stud and ask, “Excuse me, do you know what the ’stand by’ status means next to my train?”

I’m not sure whats going on here. First, she could have asked any one of the people that were more conveniently located near her original position. Seoondly, who doesn’t know what ‘Stand By’ means? It means ‘wait’. As the confused blonde walked away I attempted to draw a conclusion based on her actions, but before I was finished another strange occurance was thrown into the mix.

The stretching blonde turned around as soon as the confused blonde left and asked, “Which train was she talking about?” The Stud, dumbfounded by the sudden attention, said, “Uh…the one that says ‘Stand by’ next to it.” There was only one train with a ‘Stand by’ status. Awkwardly, the young blonde said, “Oh…I thought she was talking about the train I’m supposed to be taking.”

Now I’m really confused. Why would the Stud know which train she was supposed to be taking? Every question asked to this guy was useless. It was like an Axe body spray commercial. The only thing that I could deduce was that he had some pheromone spray like Love Potion No.9 that drew women into him.

Just that moment, Captain Obvious comes back and starts up his obvious talk once again.

I couldn’t take anymore so I decided to take my wheely bag and move to another spot in the room.

Departure

 

So finally the train arrived, a full hour late. As the travellers congregate around the escalator down to the track, who do I see but the confused blonde. She has two giant bags that she’s wheeling around behind her and hitting everyone in the thighs. I let her pass in front of me as to avoid a thigh smashing, and she settles into the crowd waiting for the escalator to turn on.

On the other side of the crowd, I notice stretchly blonde too. This is an odd turn of events because the only certainty that could have been drawn from their earlier interaction was that the two blondes were NOT on the same train.

The escalator starts up, and the crowd begins to move. Confused blonde hits the escalator first and doesn’t understand the protocol even though she saw the handful of the people in front of her go through the motions. “Ticket Please.” Of course she has it in one of her giant bags. To her credit, she zipped into one of her bags and pulled out the ticket in a split second. Unfortunately she lost all that credit when she tried to take both bags down an escalator side-by-side and didn’t understand the basic concepts of space and matter.

Eventually she got down and the crowd moved along. As I approached the escalator, a familiar group turned up once again. Who other than the Indian drooly-fist crew cuts right along the side of the escalator and takes a sharp turn into the front of the line before heading down the escalator.

I finally make my way into the train with my obscure wait-mates. I realize that people seem to have lost the ability to ’stand by’. Its been lost to the point that people don’t even know what it means anymore. The mere idea of ‘Stand by’ causes people to run around and do all kinds of crazy things to avoid the idea of being in one spot. So the moral of the story is to take a chill pill. I gotta stop writing because my train just arrived at it’s destination.