Routine is very important to me. When something is important to me I find that it behooves me to include it in a regular routine, or I have found that even if it is extremely valuable in my life, I will forget to do it. I have found that if I do the thing at the same time every day, more or less, there is a greater chance that I will remember to do it.
When you take a forty-five minute to one hour train ride twice a day as I do, it is good to have something to occupy your time so that you don’t end up staring at the ground or looking at the passengers around you — this is particularly a good idea in a city where the wrong stare can get you attacked.
In the beautiful city of New York there are regularly millions of people trying to get from one place to another — the most affordable of which has to be the New York subway system. If all the people who rode the subway system would abide by even half of the rules that are announced over the loudspeaker, everything would run a lot more smoothly. Since, for some reason, people don’t want to follow the rules, allow me to introduce some more rules — rules of how to be rude while riding on the subway.
I was ready to write a humor based article on how you can gauge the importance of a subway service announcement from how easy it is to understand it — the more important the announcement, the more likely that it will be garbled and impossible to understand. This is despite the fact that many service announcements are pre-recorded and have been for awhile.
We know we are being watched. We accept we are being recorded. We’ve even learned to recognize the multiplicity of cameras that bludgeon our every move now and forevermore. There are cameras in the lampposts. There are recording devices in the coffee cups. The eyes of a peacock’s tail — as it struts along fallow land in the wilds of the Bronx and the niches of Central Park — have become a thousand, Panopticonic, eyes perceiving our every move.
Continue reading → 3100 MTA Eyes and 2000 NYPD Requests to Watch
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