Transience

I found out yesterday that I've never really known my city. I've lived in Salt Lake my whole twenty-three years and I've always been grateful to have never changed my view.... But you sure miss a lot when you walk the same way to life each morning. Yesterday I changed things up a little, and rode old UTA to school in Provo. Besides the fact that it was a five-hour ordeal (I'm talking actual transit time only), I completely enjoyed myself. I felt like a tourist trying to be a local, feigning ease on the local transportation system while gripping bus schedules and printed itineraries deep in my bag....

Downtown felt a lot more like downtowns I have visited--I saw the commotion of surivival, all across a scale, from bums shuffling from garbage can to garbage can to money-makers rushing to the next big deal. I've had a hard time seeing this from the inside of my car. It's like driving around in a bubble, especially the way I play my music. And the buildings looked more beautiful. I second what Jana B said about what Dorothy said about finding everything in your own backyard. (Didn't Anne Shirley have something to say about that too?) If only I could approach my own home with the same zest and interest as I do those places I travel to, believing in the "infinite suggestiveness of finite things" right outside my door.

Several things I like about public transportation:
-HUGE windows
-a perfect set-up for disguised eavesdropping

-being able to read, sleep, daydream to my heart's content

-not having to even think about traffic
and mostly,
-the way it builds my sense of community.

Seriously, at every stop it is as though the kaleidoscope has been turned and I am on the inside while the picture changes. The doors open and it's all motion; it settles down and the faces are different and the conversations are different. It is strange to sit through so many stops as people come and go, noticing when they get on and when they get off and following them in my mind as they go to their homes and realizing that they each have lives as complete and consuming as mine is to me. Prepare yourselves for an obvious comment: What I am to me, everyone else is to themselves. Profound, eh? I am the master of these sort of awareness moments; I am reminded of the time it occurred to me that there were only two genders in the whole world. You're either one or the other...there's no other option. I was with my Dad at the time, who first said something about the sea horse being genderless, and then mocked me for such a childish observation. Well, sometimes things hit me like a brick dropping out of the sky and it is after that, in my mentally-altered state, that I have these realizations. Really though, everyone is stuck with themselves, doing the best they can with what they've got.

Riding TRAX also reminded me of the old days in Paris on the metro. Strange how quickly things become commonplace (like riding the metro for hours everyday, relying on it to get everywhere) and how quickly they fade from memory. The metro (or TRAX or public transportation in general) really has a lot to teach about human interaction, especially in its unspoken rules. Never look someone across from you in the face if they are looking back. Never bump knees. Never look at the panhandlers. Never smile or acknowledge ridiculous conversations around you. Never look happy. Never look interested in anything. UNLESS someone speaks to you, and then you may, if you want, act like a human being.