Saturday, February 10, 2007

Ordinary


It’s an ordinary day. You’re getting on an ordinary bus with ordinary passengers, leaving an ordinary Seattle location for another ordinary Seattle destination.

You witness an ordinary drug deal taking place under the ordinary bus shelter (meant to protect you from the ordinary rain), scrounge for an ordinary quarter to supplement your ordinary dollar, mount the ordinary vegetable oil-run bus and sit down quite ordinarily beside an ordinary citizen with six ordinary grocery bags of exceptionally ordinary groceries.

You exhale an ordinary sigh of security, knowing that everything is predictably…, well… ordinary.

Then, you covertly begin glancing around the bus to size up your fellow passengers

(…as one ordinarily does)…

When suddenly you notice that the man across the aisle wearing the overtly ordinary khaki outfit (held together by bland leather shoes and an oddly ordinary canvass shoulder bag) has freed a folded, quite ordinary blank piece of paper from his ordinary inner professor coat pocket and is frantically scribbling mathematical equations in a most hasty and stunningly UNordinary fashion.

From your uncomfortably ordinary public perspective, you can clearly make out the various variables in his pace-increasing, scribbled equations.

And, they are clearly not ordinary. Yes—some are actual numbers that you recognize from your privileged 2nd grade education, but most are illegible squiggles that, were you not so ordinary, you might ordinarily recognize as grand theoretical and philosophical concepts represented by bloated alphabet soup ingredients.

You spend a moment entertaining embarrassingly ordinary fantasies of what his calculations could possibly pertain to…

…. 1) he’s supporting the yet un-proven theory that the number of To-Go-Double-shot Americano-Coffee condensation droplets in a single Seattle bus is directly proportional to the number of North Face-attired bus riders

2) he’s working out a Relativity-embracing theory that holds that arbitrary seating on buses (aided by the presence of pet dogs on the bus floor and Self-Help books in passenger hands) is indeed the most efficient way to cram a single unit of public transportation

3) he’s rewriting his grandmother’s shopping list in celestially navigate-able form…

4) he’s…..

JAB!... an ordinary, bearded bus regular suddenly pokes you in the shoulder, and you realize that the bus has come to a not very Unordinary halt at your ordinary stop.

You get off, walk home and take time to mentally tickle your clit because it’s Friday.

And, predictably, your clit responds excitedly.

Why?

Because it’s not only Friday, but it’s a Friday most ordinary.

(for best taste, insert fondue-cheese grin here…)

**Shameless thievery Update: Cartoon commuter pic stolen from Mr. E

7 comments:

dingobear said...

What a terrific, ordinary post!

I think the ordinary, bus-riding mathematician was working out the Grand Unification Theory of the Ordinary Universe, which surprisingly, contains a lot of Greek letters.

-c said...

Ahaa! The G.U.T of the Ordinary Universe! Now that I think about it.., I think that was probably it!

Cap'n Rich said...

Ha! What an extraordinary post! Bravo!

You spies keep up the good work. I would like to make one suggestion: learn to read equations upside down and backwards.

The CIA will appreciate it.

Whoa! Don't get any ideas. I'm just an ordinary citizen.

Frustrated Writer said...

lol, okay your ordinary post was extraordinary and as for the man wit hthe scribbling, he may have only been trying to figure out the firing order for a 1200cc engine in a 1986 Camry.

L said...

What a great post! possibly my favorite one ever by you :)

Anonymous said...

yo C,
i've totally been that guy on the bus!! in fact, i've been that guy on TheBus. you know, math doesn't just solve itself - it takes weirdos on buses. p.s. my email got zapped on account of my never checking it, so i lost the addresses of everyone i never knew; drop a line and tell me how great you've been doing. aloha!

Frustrated Writer said...

You realize we are now into day 11 of "The Blogging World Held Hostage" as we have yet to see a new post from you. Sigh, you must love to torture/tease us.