Ticket Stub

I took the train to Philadelphia yesterday to visit a couple of old college buddies. There is still a distinct socio-class difference in America; you can see it through the railway system. New Jersey Transit costs $14 (peak fare) to go from NY Penn Station to 30th Street Station. It takes 3 hours for the trip. It is used primarily by security guards, educators, unkempt mothers with crying babies, and loud rude people who blow their noses, scratch their armpits and proclaim loudly at the “Gawd lordy the lack of room in the cars”. The passengers are overwhelmingly black. The train screeches and lurches every time it slows to a stop. Amtrak trains are sleek and faster (somewhat). Amtrak costs $48 to go from Philadelphia to New York, off peak fare. It takes approximately 1.5 hours to zoom the same distance. The passengers are primarily businessmen, lawyers, girls who squawk over their cell phones, “Like, my mom won’t give me money to get this delicious purse…”, and fat balding men who stretch out like sea lions on open seats. They are overwhelmingly white. The train smoothly stops next to the escalator in the station. I took NJT to Philadelphia. As the train chugged along, I find that the rail tracks are beautiful. Brown rough steel inlaid with gleaming blue-gray metal; two straight lines parallel, stretching out without comment to the endless horizon, always keeping the same distance between them. If only relationships were like that. Bespeckled gravel playing with the afternoon sun, lying carelessly between unflinching uncaring boundaries. Vanilla beams crossing the tracks, like steps going somewhere, steady steps that don’t break a sweat or shed a tear. The track, with its individual colors and parts, stubbornly refused to be roused by speed, and soon its details, those lines and colors, were blurred. Brownblue-graybespeckled|vanilla. Like a swirling soup of colors, or dreams, or something undefined, lighted aglow by the clouded sun. I suspect that’s what I needed to do with my life. Stop breaking it down to individual parts and let it blur. Who is to say that the blurred picture is less desirable than the clear static image? Blur my career and my loves and my people. My spirituality, my yearnings, my hates, my everdays, and my goals. Blur it all, and maybe the speed of life will make it beautiful. The boys were still the same. Rob is living with a girl but not really dating her. Henry is seriously dating someone but not living with her. And they act really gay when they get together. There is a rush of judgment among people my age to get engaged. I found that Norman and Kristine are engaged and that he spent his entire year’s savings on the ring. It seems that Kristine went with him to choose the ring. Perhaps I need to get on this engagement wagon, before all the prospects dry up. I mean, at this rate, by the time I’m twenty-six all my friends will have been hook, line and sinker. Time to get in while the getting is good. Besides, it’s an insurance thing. Who said engagement necessarily has to lead to marriage? Perpetual engagement, that’s the new paradigm. You gotta back up your files, right? And if engagement is a serious ploy that results in marriage, it’s a stupid idea. Basically, you’re making a commitment to being committed? I think it’s just a ploy for women to get an extra piece of jewelry. Rob mentioned that each year, the girls in college are getting younger. Or was it that we were getting older? ‘It seems like we get older but nothing has changed,’ Rob said. ‘Well, except for the fact that you’re increasingly bitter and want to quit your job,’ I said. ‘Fucker,’ he said. ‘Maybe you need to date younger women,’ I said. ‘Makes you less bitter.’ ‘I can’t even look at girls under twenty-one,’ he said. ‘Yeah, just the talk of midterms and studying zones me out.’ ‘But maybe it’ll be good for me,’ he said. ‘Don’t you have a girlfriend?’ ‘She’s twenty-three.’ ‘Yeah, having an eighteen year old girl will solve all your problems.’ I took Amtrak back to New York. By the time I got back, I realized that all my friends are leading lives. Lives! We all have actual lives now, meaty with unique expectations and heavy with responsibilities. Gone are the days of dining halls and football on the green, of homogenous experiences in the petri dish of academia and the solitude of the ivory towers. And as we burden ourselves, we increasingly separate our paths. Rob is doggedly living the slacker way. Henry is moving up the corporate ladder, securing his comfortable middle management lifestyle. Dan is in his third year of med school. Yas is heading off to the Peace Corps. And everyone is looking inward to find something that will fulfill and inspire them, although right now, they call that careers and relationships. Oh, to be twentysomething and not afraid!