We're Gonna Fly Like An Eagle...With Two Broken Wings

I woke up this morning at 8:00 AM. Although this is quite early for somebody who has the day, nay entire week, off, but for me, this could well qualify as sleeping in. We teachers are up each day at the crack of dawn. By 8:00 AM, I am already picking up my homeroom and rearing to face another daylong bout with the trials and tribulations that are inherent to working with teenagers.

I fell asleep before 10:00 PM, so I had a very good night's sleep for myself. I felt very refreshed and recharged, except for my neck, which was screaming at me for another 800 mg dose of ibuprofin.

I got up, gathered my gym stuff, and finally set about the task of assembling the items I needed to return to LL Bean via mail, and a package containing a gift for my friend Suzanne's little girl. The pathetic thing is that some of the items needing to be returned to LL Bean had been ordered back in the summer, and I bought the gift for the little girl on my day-after-Thanksgiving shopping spree. Does this indicate how much I hate to face the post office.

But, I figured, what the hell? I have the day off, it was early enough, and since the Christmas rush is clearly over, the lines couldn't be that bad, right?

I walked in and saw that the woman behind the counter was standing there idle. I thought I must be dreaming. Clearly there couldn't be just me in the post office. The reality of the situation settled in fast and furiously, however, when I realized that I had just entered the building on the opposite side to where the line formed. The woman was only unoccupied behind the counter because she had just finished with one customer and was waiting for another to approach the window.

There were only about 6 people in line, though, and seeing as where the man and woman in front of me were all but copulating right there in the middle of the Union Square Post Office, I assumed they must be in line together, and therefore estimated that although there were 6 people in front of me, only 5 transactions were to be made before me. I looked at my watch. 8:58 AM. Great. I had a class at the gym starting at 10:00. The walk from the post office to the gym should only take 25 or so minutes, so I figured I had at least a half hour to get out of the post office and still have enough time to walk to the gym. Great!

I became somewhat nervous when the customer who had just approached the window on my arrival unloaded two shopping bags worth of small packages to be mailed, all to various locations around the globe. Considering that most of his communication with the English speaking postal worker involved smoke signals, interpretive dance and sign language, I could only assume that the items were being shipped overseas, and therefore would involve lots of forms and papers, none of which he seemed to have prepared ahead of time. Not only that, but the postal worker told the man that the items were packaged in domestic postal boxes, and had to be repackaged and obviously, therefore, readdressed. I have encountered this problem, myself, many times. I hardly ever just get it right when sending packages overseas, and am often relegated to a side table to readdress and repack items. The postal workers have never allowed me to perform all those foolish tasks right there at the window, holding up the rest of the line. But today, well, today was different. The woman started helping the customer open his gifts, repack them, fill out the paperwork, etc. Then she noticed that he was sending bottles of ibuprofin in his packages, and produced another pile of paperwork to be filled out. The couple in front of me, by this point going at it hot and heavy, put down their yellow bubble wrap and left, presumably to go buy an EPT kit. I think the woman left her bra right there on the floor. Anyway, by this time, the line is snaking several times over around the entire post office and tensions are rising.

The repackaging of the biomedical hazardous toxins was finally complete and we all started to breathe a sigh of relief. But, not so fast there, buckaroo. The customer now reports that SIX WEEKS ago he received a notice saying that he had a special delivery to pick up at the post office. When the postal worker asked him to produce the notice, HE DIDN'T HAVE IT...OF COURSE! Instead of telling the guy to buzz off, the postal worker takes another several moments looking for the thing out back.

Meanwhile, there was movement behind a second window and the people in line were getting all excited. Finally, at long last, the transaction with the guy was done. I looked at my watch. 9:37. He had been up there for 39 minutes! As he backed away from the window, everybody in line broke into spontaneous applause. I'm not joking! The second window was flung open as another postal worker came on to receive customers. Another round of applause. However, no sooner had the second woman opened her window, than the first woman, (the one who had just spent 39 minutes with the idiot with the 34 packages), announced, "Sorry folks, I'm closed. Morning break." I am glad everybody laughed out loud instead of getting mad. It was really funny, though, that everybody simultaneously started laughing. One guy in the line yelled out, "Ok, where's the hidden camera?" Some young kid yelled out, "Have we just been Punk'd?"

I finally got my two boxes taken care of. It took one minute. I was forced, however, to take a bus to the gym rather than walk. That stunk.

I got to the gym for the 11:00 class. The woman who usually teaches, Maria, is a phenomenal step instructor, but she is constantly out. Apparently she has about 7 kids, and each week, one or the other of them comes down with some rare disease usually only found in the deepest depths of the Amazon basin, but which somehow crops up in her suburban Lexington home to afflict her kids. I think she's off skiing, in reality. Every time she returns from nursing her sick young back to health, she has an ace bandage around her knee and a suntan/windburn that can only come from hurtling down a double back diamond trail at full throttle.

The substitute instructor was OK, but her class was so painfully boring. Dreadfully boring, in fact. She went over the same three second routine throughout the whole hour. It made the class seem soooooooo long. I mean, don't get me wrong, I was sweating my ass off by the end of the thing, but it just seemed like I was there forever and ever.

When I wash finished working out, I was getting ready to leave in the locker room. It was pretty funny because this woman came in and she had this massive duffel bag with her. There could only have been a dead body in there. It was that big and heavy. Anyway, for some reason, she chose to take a locker in the most crowded locker bay, and she chose the locker that was the wedged into the furthest corner of the bay. I guess that's what you do when you are hiding a dead body in your bag. On her way in, she hit every one of us with her bag, literally knocking one tiny woman right over onto a nearby bench. The woman who got knocked over hadn't seen it coming and let out a little surprised yelp. The bitch who hit her just turned stared at her, and then turned around and proceeded to go about her business. No apology. Cambridge people. The girl who had been knocked over just laughed out loud. We all followed. This still elicited no response from the woman who knocked the girl over.

From the gym, I went over to Anna's Taqueria to meet my mom for lunch. It was nice to hang out with her. In fact, its nice to just be outside during the day. Ahh....so this is what people with real jobs do. They get to leave their places of business to go have lunch with friends. Not I. I spent most of my 25 minute lunch break disciplining kids, chasing AWOL kids around the school, policing who stole lunch tickets from whom, and curbing the illegal trafficking of said stolen lunch tickets.

Anyway, I had planned to walk back to Harvard Square, but decided, instead, to take the bus down to the Galleria mall to see if I could take advantage of any of these fabulous post-holiday sales I'd heard so much about.

Boston has the oldest pubilc transportation system in the country. I can see being proud of this achievement of mass transport pioneering and wanting to be somewhat traditional, but still...perhaps the state could think about not having the same busses, trains and routes that were available at the time of the T's inception. The bus schedules are probably good for lining your bird cage, but otherwise, I can't think of much use for them. They certainly don't indicate the correct times at which busses and trains will show up. I can't tell you how many times I've arrived at the stop 5 minutes before the bus is supposed to be there, only to see it pulling away. I've had experiences where I'm standing at the stop and the driver speeds on by. And then there is the joy of waiting for hours and hours in the freezing cold for a bus that just never comes. Most busses run on a 15 to 20 minute interval (allegedly), but I have waited more than an hour for busses, which means they are missing 3 to 4 cycles of busses on the route. Last year, we had this massive snow storm, which resulted in an entire week off of school for us. I had been staying with a friend the night of the storm. When I got up the next day, I decided to take the bus home. There was little choice as the train in that area is above ground and was not running. I waited for TWO HOURS AND FOUR MINUTES and it was less than 5 degrees outside. How I still have all my digits and toes remains a mystery.

Anyway, today, the schedule indicated that the bus would be there at 12:55. It showed up at 1:35. Forty more minutes spent waiting today. When the bus came, I just walked right by the driver without paying. It seemed as if he was about to say something, but when he realized that the woman behind me and the man behind her were also not making any moves for their wallets, he backed off and chose to keep his pie hole shut. Good move.

I was disappointed to find that the sales at the mall were not as great as I thought they would be. There were a few good sales on at Ann Taylor, but everything that appealed to me was only available in size XS. Maybe I should have bought three or four of each and sewn them together. Please people! The reason all the XS garments are left is because nobody fucking wears size XS. Just a reality check to Ann Taylor, inc. But they are not the only guilty party. The Gap was also pushing size XS in every garment, in addition to size 00 jeans. Size 00? What the hell is that? Something for paper dolls? Certainly that is not made for 3 dimensional beings?

Whatever.

I had myself mentally prepared for the crowds at the mall. I knew there would be lines, bumping and shoving, slamming doors in peoples faces, cutting in line, etc.

Still, though, seeing all those behaviors in real life never ceases to amaze me.

One of my first stops was in Old Navy. They had jeans on sale for 20 dollars and I decided to pick up a pair. Why not? I was in line behind a woman who had a bag and nothing else. Obviously she was there to conduct a return. When her turn came in the line, she just thrusted the bag at the cashier and didn't say a single word. So, not only did she not say good morning, but she didn't even feel the need to tell the cashier that she was making an exchange (which may have been obvious, but still, come on..how much energy does it take to treat a fellow human being like, well, a fellow human being?), nor did she feel the need to even go so far as to remove the item from the bag to present to the cashier. The customer went through the entire transaction without speaking a word to the cashier and when the cashier said, "Thanks and have a nice day." the customer just turned on her heel and walked away. Did this woman feel that this young lady working at Old Navy was beneath her and not even worthy of the utterance of a single syllable in her direction? Christ!

I was buying a scarf at HM and this lady just walked right in front of me in the line. No joking. No confusion. I was right there, waiting to buy my scarf. There was one customer in front of me. She was called to the next available register, and this newly arrived customer just walked right up and occupied her space, right in front of me.

I can't count the number of times I stepped out of walkways to let people who were advancing from the opposite direction and showing no signs of slowing down or ceding the pathway to me. Now, I was not in any hurry and I certainly have no objection to letting people walk by. But I do object to people not even acknowledging that I've done so and not even saying thanks. Although I was pretty good about not confronting the line cutter in HM and the rude be-hotch in Old Navy, I did indeed shout, "you're welcome" to all the for whom I held doors or cleared walking paths and from whom I received not even the briefest of apologies.

Ahhhh....back at home. Safe and sound.