Obliterating optimism for this post, I am feeling really sick so I’m going to be cranky. Hold on to your hats for:

I do not heart public transportation, or notes taken while riding the necessary whore (the GO Train)

The West has assumed all the comforts of the modern world: Spicy restaurants. Botox Clinics. Little League teams wearing CoffeMate jerseys. Cookie exchanges. All-winged news sources. Tree planting ceremonies. Constant dust clouds from underpass, road, hiway, construction. Pets. Pets that you can stuff in your purse. Romantic getaways. Cars. And for the not so lucky, public transportation.

Today on the GO Train, I sat across the isle from a girl about my age (23.5). She worked at the Ontario Science Centre. I know this because she was wearing a red canvas smock with the centre’s logo -- resembling a Venn diagram -- on the breast (no winter jacket). She looked laboratory bound as well, constantly turning in on herself as if to examine her body: hunched, thin and meekly sipping her miso soup in a cup held by long curling fingers, curly hair twisted into a frizzy ponytail, looking out the window at 6pm (which at this point is opaque), thus really inspecting her own reflection. I also know it was miso soup, because following that, she withdrew wooden one-use chopsticks from her blue backpack (another give-away) and tweezed away at a bento box.

Yes, she had a full fucking bento box on the GO train.

I don’t know why exactly the sight, a girl eating a bento box on the GO train, was both disheartening and hilarious. (You think, in the reflection of the window glass, she too thought eating sushi with chopsticks on her way home to Hamilton was also comical?) Maybe it was just a curve ball to the granola bar/sandwich/cinnamon bun snacks I see people produce daily from their briefcases, backpacks, purses, and other work-related burdens. My mom often buys sushi at the grocery store, so I won’t try and compare my sushi palate with said GO train rider/ science star. And I also won’t assume that she got her fucking bento box at a grocery store. She probably got it from an actual sushi outlet (close to the science centre) on the way home.

So why does this bother me so much? It's like my nephew's first word being "szechuan", you know? Is this progression? Maybe I just feel that this is a distilled example of how North America has really fucked things up. We are everywhere and nowhere. Nothing is untouched and therefore, nothing is special. I'm not saying that sushi has to be eaten with some sort of ritual. This is just one example of something that has become diluted. But, I don’t really know what I’m getting at, and I don’t know where this rant is going. I just wanted to tell you that I saw a girl, in a red Ontario Science Centre Jacket eating a full sushi dinner -- with chopsticks and fucking miso soup -- on the fucking GO train. Period. You may think her talented.

Since I am writing this on the GO Train, I will also mention that some dickhead across from me, with a Wholefoods canvas grocery bag (that he, by the way, put on the chair beside him so I couldn't’t put my feet up) is blasting Billy Joel’s "we didn’t start the fire" on his i Pod (yes, playing this so loud I can hear it). And, he is tapping his Nike sneakers, bouncing his dress-pant covered knees, and shaking his receeding hairline to the beat...


Done.