Sweating alone

[muckefuck]

Yesterday evening, I encountred the bane of the summer commute: The unairconditioned el car. When I felt the first blast of heated air, I told myself Maybe it's been sitting in the yard for a while. Maybe so, but the fact remained that what was coming out of the vents was in no way cooler than the air already in the car.

So I weighed the merits of coolness against the merits of quiet and decided I'd rather have a car all to myself, even if it were 100 degrees inside. I also seized on the banging-your-head-against-a-wall rationalisation: Think how much cooler the outdoors will feel after this!

I began to take a perverse pleasure in watching everyone who boarded exclaim about the heat and make a beeline for the emergency doors in order to cross to the next car. Yes, flee, lesser mortals! At some point, it occurred to me that I might be luring some of them in, since an empty car on a busy train is far more suspicious than one with even a single highly visibile passenger.

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

Steaming for free! It's very good for your pores.

Chicagoans are weenies.

[febrile.livejournal.com]

I love the unairconditioned El cars. They remind me of home: hot and spacious.

Unairconditioned buses, mind you, are positively Danteic because people don't have the opportunity of squnching in somewhere else.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

I knew my subway car was bad but I imagined it was tolerable until we reached Times Square and I realized the fetid air baking in the station was actually cooler.