Day 2

10/18/11
It was cooler this morning and there seemed to be fewer people on the Eastbound this morning. One thing that was different was that there seemed to be an abundance of trade workers all of which were Hispanic. A few stops in an older Hispanic lady was having trouble with getting the machine to take her dollar. A 30 something Caucasian man got up from the back and went to the front and gave her a crisp dollar in exchange for the one she was having problems with. It’s nice to see civility (or maybe he was just in a hurry and wanted the bus to get going. I put my faith in civility). The bus driver just sat the whole time and seemed disinterested in the whole situation. Thankfully there was no bus stench, but the smell of sweet strawberries. My guess was that someone had just put on some sort of lotion, which was nice. I did recognize 2 people who were on the bus the day before. The civil guy and another middle aged guy who, from the way he was dressed looked like a short order cook. Also, I thought I recognized a mentally ill man who used to roam around a lot, but he had a hood and glasses on and could not be sure.

There was a student a few seats up who was studying some type of mathematics. I thought he was in high school, but maybe college as the math looked fairly advanced calculus and he stayed on the bus after I left, which was right before the university stop. It was hard to tell.

As we continued to move east, the college students trickled in. I took a quick estimate about the number of people with white earplugs protruding from their ears. Although the bus was not totally full I estimated that roughly half either was utilizing Apple products or faking it. Steve Jobs would not have been contempt with this number though, if he was alive. He probably would be focused on the ones who did not have Apple products and also on why the bus was not equipped with plug-ins or Apple friendly bus mechanisms. One of the college students (presumably) was a black girl who had piercings in both ends of her bottom lips and was sporting something I had not seen in a while = traditional Vans shoes. The other thing that struck me about her was that she had pulled a zip lock bag full of hot Cheetoes out of her checkered backpack and was munching on them at 7 in the morning. Nice.

I was surprised at the amount of kids who got off at the stop by a middle school along the route. I didn’t realize that so many middle school kids road the city bus as opposed to the school bus. Once again ½ the bus off loaded at the city college.


This is the stop right after the city college stop. Empty.

 A black man got on at the and sat in front of me. He was probably middle aged, bald and well dressed with his no collar shirt tucked into his jeans. What struck me about him was that he had the skin discoloration disorder on both his hands. At first I thought he had on gloves, but upon closer observation from my well hidden eyes I noted that his hands were as white as mine. The gentleman made me think that maybe the recently deceased Michael Jackson may have very well suffered from this disorder intensely, as opposed to rumors of self shading and such. I suppose we will never know. The bus was 10 minutes late to my stop.