Entries tagged with “Rant” from Things You Don't Care About

So I have been a fan of the new Battlestar Galactica series since it started three or so years ago.  I have to admit that last season I wasn't so fired up about the show; the first part of the season, dealing with New Caprica and the skeleton-crewed fleet, leading up to quite possibly the most balls-to-the-wall scene ever (this one, if you've never seen it before), was pretty good.  The second half, though, dragged, and had way too much mystical claptrap, especially dealing with Starbuck.

This season though, has really just gone completely out the window.  Some of you might not of seen it yet, so I'm going to tuck my rant behind the cut.  The short version is that there's nothing fucking happening and the characters seem to have morphed into complete assholes in the last few episodes.  Very frustrating.

...if you work for a living, you are too fucking old to be wearing a costume at work on Halloween (unless that IS your job anyway).  Every year when this lovely holiday rolls around, there are people who dress up in costume, often extremely lame ones, and come on in to work.  It's time to grow the hell up people.  Seriously.  You're not in grade school anymore, where everyone dresses up for Halloween and goes on parade through school.  You're not at a party with your friends.  You are at your goddamn job.

Yes, I know I'm Captain Crankypants today anyway, thanks to stress of many different sorts and my lovely hormone shot yesterday, but this has driven me crazy for years.  Yes, I know I strangled my inner child to death sometime between middle school and sophomore or junior year of high school, but come on.  I can't be the only one who thinks this.  I am fine with dressing up in costume and going to Halloween parties or whatever (Monday's Chuck was friggin' hilarious), but at work...gah.  I don't want to have a meeting with someone in a stupid Batman costume.  I don't want to be accosted by Godzilla in the hallway while trying to get to my office.  So grow the hell up and keep your stupid costumes for some other more appropriate venue.

"...is that you're on the bus, surrounded by the sort of people who take the bus."

I take the bus.  Champaign's bus system is pretty decent, I get to ride for free thanks to the University, and it stops right across the street from my house and drops me off a block from work, so really, there's no logical reason not to take the bus.  Especially when the University has decided that the way to take care of the parking problem on campus is to charge up the wazoo for it, and a parking space on campus now costs only slightly less than just paying the 75 cent an hour meters.  Yes, it takes about a half hour to get to work and more like 45 minutes to get home, but I can read or whatever and don't have to pay attention to driving.

On the other hand, there are many days when I realize why the American car culture exists, or at least, why it is self-perpetuating.  The bus I take is usually pretty full and drives from way out on the ass-end of town where I live, through campus and then back out on the ass-end of Urbana on the other side.  This gives you an interesting cross-section of humanity.  Maybe I'm just a giant jerk, but sharing my morning commute with people who find it necessary to have conversations with their friends at the top of their lungs, complete with raucous laughter, the borderline crazy people who sit there and talk to themselves or hum constantly at a volume that is slightly too loud to ignore, and the high school and college students who find it necessary to have loud conversations on the cell phone (yes, I know I sound like an old woman, but for crying out loud, no one wants to hear about how completely drunk you were and what you did that you just can't believe), along with people who haven't been introduced to the wonders of modern hygiene and smell like the men's room in a gas station, do not make the experience pleasant on many occasions.  To be fair, I'm sure I just remember the bad days more than the normal ones, but....

Now, here's the big question for me.  Why is it that the bus is like this, while the subway seems to be a transit system that has a much wider cross-section of people?  Whenever I take the bus, it never seems to have too many "professionals" -- doctors, lawyers, businessmen, etc -- but when I visit Boston or Washington DC, everyone rides the T or the Metro.  I get the feeling it's that way in New York and a lot of other cities as well.  Now, to be fair, I would do anything I could to avoid driving in Boston too, but is it just that driving is far less convenient?  That the parking is impossible to come by?  The subway doesn't seem to be as easy to catch -- buses, at least in Champaign, seem to be a lot more accessible.  I sort of wish I had taken the bus in Seattle when I was there, since it's a large city without a subway or commuter rail (no, the Monorail doesn't really count) to see if it was the same.

Am I a bad person because people on the bus drive me nuts?