#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

This fearlessly, brutally honest 1995 memoir examines the exhilarating highs and soul-crushing lows of manic-depressive illness (now more commonly called bipolar disorder) from the perspective of a psychiatrist trapped in the disease. Her frank and intimately personal insights bring the disease's cycles of terror, elation and crushing, abject despair into stark and sometimes heartbreaking clarity. It was recommended to me soon after I was diagnosed as bipolar in 2008, and it grabbed me on every level--from its smart writing to the recognizable, relatable, almost comforting details of its narrative--and I all but literally didn’t put the book down until I’d finished it. I have an indelible memory of reading it on the Red Line EL train home from work one night in Chicago, and a man who’d clearly seen me reading it made sure we made eye contact as he stood up and then he patted me reassuringly on the shoulder as he got off at the Sheridan stop. That encounter--a direct extension of this book--made me literally weep as I was coming to grips with label “mentally ill” and discovering the signs I’d never thought to notice until then that I wasn’t alone. If you are or love someone who is bipolar--or struggling with any mental illness--this book will make you weep, give you hope and quite possibly change your life.

My hair has an unfortunate drowned-rat quality this evening

Which is EXACTLY why I didn’t get a phone number from that hot guy with the wife and kids on the monorail.

Break out the cargo shorts and black socks with Tevas because We! Are! Here!

The bus stop at the Island of Aruba in the Caribbean Beach Resort is the best Disney fun we’ve had all day. SO FAR.

If My Fair Lady takes place in London, why does our rehearsal taping look like a Chicago CTA map?

Flashback Friday: Dearborn Lights Edition

This used to be my wintry after-work walk to the subway. For a block and a half. Then I’d descend the CTA stairs at Dearborn & Monroe, wait up to 20 minutes on the mildew-scented platform for a train I could squeeze into, and then ride another 20 minutes home squished butt-to-butt with 5,000 people congenitally incapable of smiling or even making eye contact. But for one glorious block every night I got to walk under a pretty magical canopy of lights.

Flashback Friday: Walking The Loop Edition

 Chicago Board of Trade. 5:50 pm. Obviously.

While I grew to thoroughly loathe my daily Chicago commutes on the packed-with-everyone-who-works-in-the-Loop Red Line, I loved walking through the epic architecture that shapes and personifies and defines the Loop while I worked there -- especially after dark when everything was bathed in dramatic lighting.

My morning U.N. meeting

Working out at 7 am involves a comforting set of rituals: Packing my lunch and my workout clothes and my work clothes the night before. Setting my alarm for 5:45 and hitting the snooze button only once so I can be up and stuffed full of eggs and toast and out the door by 6:10 in time to catch the bus. And hanging out at my silent United Nations meeting, which convenes every morning at my bus stop with the following cast of international representatives:

The white guy. That’s me. I’m wearing my gym clothes with my stuffed-to-bursting gym bag over my shoulders. And even though it’s pretty dark I’m usually reading something.

The blue-collar black woman. She wears a uniform that says she probably works in a hotel or at a restaurant. And she always looks tired.

The yuppie white girl. She’s always in a suit of some sort with her hair just so and her tennis shoes on and her bag that usually goes with her coat.

The Hispanic woman who’s always in a hurry. She runs—runs!—from the cross-town bus that drops her off right across the street from us and arrives breathless at our bus stop. Even though our bus never arrives until well after she’s joined us and gotten her heart rate back to normal.

The Middle Eastern woman who won’t stand anywhere near us. She wears the head covering that hides her hair and neck and the long flowing outfit that shows only her hands and her shoes. And she stands a good 15 paces away from the rest of us with her head down the whole time. She stands so far away, in fact, that she almost misses the bus some mornings waiting for us to get on before she ventures near the door.

The bus driver. He thinks he’s a gruff old man and he tries to stare forward when we board, but I make a point to say good morning when I get on and to thank him when I get off and I think I’ve finally broken him to the point that he realizes he’s never going to escape from my preternatural morning perkiness.

This is going to freak your shit OUT

ONE!
So on Friday night after the domestic partner and I had our dinner with a celebrity (We had dinner with a celebrity!), we caught a cab home. But wasn't just any cab. It was a wheelchair-accessible van. The middle row of seats had been removed to make room for wheelchairs, so we sat in what was originally the very back row and enjoyed the kind of leg room that would make a United passenger weep. The only thing sharing the space with us was a huge wheelchair ramp that was strapped against the back of the driver's seat. Speaking of, our driver wasn't what we'll call the smartest kitten in the drawer. And when he slammed on his brakes (which was often) we slid right out of our seats into the middle-seat-less void since we had nothing to brace our legs against. Our driver also wasn't quite sure where our street was, even though it's a pretty well-known Chicago street. And the type of people who have dinner with celebrities live on it. But he eventually got us home, and he and his Traveling Kingdom of Legroom were soon forgotten.

TWO!
The next day, the domestic partner and I were running late to get downtown to meet some friends for dinner. So we grabbed a cab. And it was the same cab from the last paragraph! Same slipery seats, same legroom, same wheelchair ramp, same not-quite-ready-for-public-streets driver. Freaky!

INTERMISSION!
We're interrupting this tale to give you time to run to the bathroom or get a refreshing beverage. If you're content where you're sitting, please visit Cute Things Falling Asleep to amuse yourselves until we return.

THREE!
I ended up working late Tuesday night. So did my co-worker Jose, who lives by me. We decided to share a cab home to maximize the remaining usable minutes in our day before crashing into bed (not with each other, for the record) and starting over again this morning. As we waited for a cab to find us, I told Jose how the domestic partner and I had freakishly ended up riding in the same wheelchair-accessible van cab two days in a row over the weekend. Suddenly, a cab drove up and stopped for us. A van cab. And when we opened the door to get in, I discovered it was the same cab once again. If this were a Lifetime movie, I'd start to worry that my deranged cab-dispatching ex-husband, played by Chad Lowe, was violating his restraining order and sending his hitman driver, played by Luke Perry, to harass me until I ended up bloodied and cowering in my dimly lit yet frugally furnished living room as atonal violin music droned ominously in the background but then I'd rise in a sudden fit of emotional fortitude, grab a store-brand knife from the butcher block in my frugally furnished kitchen and stab my ex-husband, played by Chad Lowe, in the spine as he attacked me through a window I hadn't relized I'd left open. And my ex-husband, played by Chad Lowe, would, in a cruel twist of irony, be left wheelchair-bound and forced to be chauffered through life in a wheelchair-accessible van cab driven by my attentive new husband, played by Luke Perry. Roll closing credits.

Doesn't that just freak your shit out?

Random things

Just after I got on my bus yesterday morning, it sideswiped a parked car. The sideswiping happened on my side of the bus, too. But I was on my way to only my fourth personal training session, so I’m pretty sure the bus wasn’t off-kilter because of my massive musculature. Though you never can tell. I was worried I’d be late for my trainer (OK, I was worried about the poor owner of the car too … but to be brutally honest I was more worried about being late for my trainer) but I’d left the house with a 15-minute cushion so I figured we’d be OK as the driver waited for whatever CTA officials are dispatched to deal with sideswiped cars at 6:00 am on a Tuesday. Fortunately, the officials came quickly, and they instructed the driver to get right on Lake Shore Drive (four blocks early!) and get all of us passengers to our downtown destinations. So I was at the gym in plenty of time for a brutal attack on my chest and back.

Because I’m done with my trainer by 8:00 and I have a very short walk to my office, I’m usually the first one to get to work on my training days. One unanticipated benefit: I’m the first to use our bathrooms. Which means I get to pee in the blue water the cleaning staff leaves in the urinals overnight. The early bird really does get the worm!

Speaking of our work urinals, some mouth-breathing cretin has penned a crude drawing of what I assume is supposed to be male genitalia (or else it’s a very disfigured hand) on one of the tiles over our leftmost urinal. Our company shares the bathroom with three other companies on our floor, and the bathroom gets lots of traffic—except, of course, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when I get to make some frothy “blue + yellow = green” magic in blissful solitude—so I don’t know when anyone would have found the privacy to actually write on the walls without being noticed. (It’s not as though the building management had the basic humanity to install partitions between our urinals or anything.) More disturbing still is the fact that some adult male in an adult office building in big-city Chicago would feel compelled to draw a penis on a bathroom wall. As though he were in a truck stop. Or a grade school. Or a Ted Haggard tent revival.

In other big-disfigured-penis news, Alaska Senator Ted “Bridge to Homophobia” Stevens has been charged with seven counts of felony corruption. And Dubya is leaving what’s left of our country with the highest dollar deficit ever recorded. And Scrabulous has been forcibly removed from Facebook, along with all records of my 30 wins and 20 losses and my 90-something-point score for actinium. Which is so devastating to me, I can’t even find the strength to bring this post full-circle and close it on a pee joke.

Things I'm thankful for

The lump was nothing.
My little sister sits at the confluence of two family lines of breast cancer. On the plus side, it has yet to kill any of our forebears; our two grandmothers survived long enough to die of basic old-people diseases, and this October will mark our mom's 20th cancer-free year. So when my sister found a lump in her breast this week, she had legitimate cause for concern. Fortunately, she and I are of the Jake School of Worry, which dictates that we not waste time dwelling on potential bad news until it becomes actual bad news. I don't talk about it much, but we're a lumpy people anyway; I have six pilar cysts on my head that are nowhere near as grotesque as the ones in these pictures (mine are more like nipples—worthless Barbie-size head nipples that don't even do nipple-like things like alert me when it's cold out). Anyway, when my sister found a lump in her breast earlier this week, she calmly went in for a detailed checkup. And then calmly emerged with a clean—albeit slightly lumpy—bill of health.

The glove was found.
The fiancé was in scenic Islip, New York, early this week, so he took a train into Manhattan to see The Farnsworth Invention. By the time he left the theater, he discovered he'd lost his glove somewhere. He called me all forlorn and glove-bereft to tell me about it on his trudge back to Union Station. And then he called me half an hour later from the train to say he'd found his glove. He'd randomly entered the same car on the same train to get himself home, and his glove was actually still sitting on the seat where he'd left it.

It was only a flesh wound.
I was cutting some crusty bread for dinner a few nights ago with my freshly sharpened bread knife when whoops! I sliced right into the top of my thumb and across my thumbnail. It didn't bleed much, but it hurt like a Romney presidency. Once we determined the gash wasn't an immediate threat to my career as a hitchhiker or a concert pianist, we put a bandage on it and ate the part of our dinner that didn't have any blood on it. And now that the pain is gone, I'm mostly concerned about my sliced-up thumbnail catching on things until it grows out. So I'm still wearing a bandage, which is so bulky it's wreaking havoc on my typinb.

Dear Chicago Transit Authority,

I have no idea how you got us so far into this financial mess. This bottomless deficit. This month-to-month bouncing between dire warnings of service shutdowns and 11th-hour proclamations of emergency funding.

I’m no economist, but I’ve always assumed that public transportation functioned as a tax-revenue loss leader—something a population-dense municipality practically gives away on the calculated assumption that its citizens will ride its subsidized trains and buses to their jobs, where they’ll generate huge amounts of revenue that can be taxed. Or they’ll take those trains and buses to go shopping, where they’ll make purchases that can be taxed. Or at the very least, their collective presence on those trains and buses will exponentially reduce vehicle traffic and road depreciation, saving money on repair costs.

Not to sound snarky and self-righteous, but it stands to reason that a population sitting at its desks or working in its stores or exploring its retail districts as consumers generates significantly more taxable revenue than a population waiting for a bus that never comes.

But what’s done is done, and we’re all waiting expectantly and with admirable patience for you to get the problem fixed.

Most of us are demonstrating admirable patience, that is. I’m here to warn you that you have officially lost the faith of one very angry, very suspicious and very talkative conspiracy theorist. He was at my bus stop yesterday morning, poring over the formidable list of threatened bus routes you’d just posted. And as soon as I walked up, I got to hear all about it. About how Blagojevich and Daley are working together to destroy the CTA in an effort to drive away the Olympics. About how Eisenhower’s interstates spelled the beginning of the end of public transportation in large cities. About how the buses sometimes smell like pee.

I have to admit, I totally agre with him on that last point.

And because your buses tend to show up at greater and greater intervals, I had to listen to this guy for 20 freaking minutes. I even whipped out my cell phone and started sending text messages to everyone I could think of to signal my loss of interest in his narrative. And you know what? He kept talking anyway. Even though I was rudely ignoring him.

And for this, I have only you to blame. You and your irresponsible budgeting. You and your political failures. You and your Olympic-hating, interstate-resentful, pee-drenched agenda to bring Chicago to a literal and financial halt.

Plus the fact that you have something called a “Brown Line,” which I think is totally funny.

ChicagoRound: My bus stop on a snowy night

The tip of a stay. Right under the tit.

Why is it OK for women to show the space between their boobs at work?

I’m not asking this as a gay man who finds boobs to be distracting only because they’re funny-looking. I’m asking as a man who is expected to keep anything below the top of my sternum hidden under clothing if I want to be taken seriously as a responsible, mature, focused professional. Who doesn’t work in porn.

And I’m not singling out any woman I work with; I’m talking about professional women in general. This morning on the bus I sat next to a woman whose blouse neckline was cut so low I could see both the top and bottom of the front of her bra … and the tops and bottoms of the insides of her boobs. And you know I wasn’t even trying. Other than her porn-o-rama décolletage, this woman was dressed for court: dark power suit, sensible pumps, briefcase, modest makeup, wash ’n’ go hair. But her two-for-one produce display made her look like she was headed to a bachelor party instead of a corporate merger.

Across the aisle sat another rack-and-bra combo exploding out of an unbuttoned sweater-and-tailored-slacks ensemble. Standing in the aisle hung a pair of well-fed prisoners clamoring to escape from the minimum-security prison of a barely buttoned silk blouse. All three displays included full xiphoid process at no extra charge.

I’m not crying double standard here. I seriously couldn’t care less if a woman wants to bring her daughters to work. It’s just that if I showed up for work in a shirt that scooped down to show the hair between my pecs, I’d probably hear about it. And not in a wow-you-sure-have-nice-pec-hair kind of way. And in all my 16 years of seeing boob crack in my professional life, only once has anyone said anything … and only then because the boobkeeper professed to be a fundamentalist Christian and we all found it deliciously ironic that she dressed to ensure a second coming and more than once made reference to the bright pink “baboon butt” on her chest.

I know: My straight male readers (all two of you) are totally jealous that I rode the mammary express to work this morning. But my life isn’t all tits ’n’ jiggles. Since I’m always the first on my bus and I always get a seat, sometimes women in miniskirts end up standing next to me and they have to reach up to hold onto the bars. And that’s a cat out of a totally different bag.

0 for 20!

To take my bus home from work, I walk a block from my building and cross the Chicago River to an extremely busy intersection. The bus stop is on the opposite corner, and with traffic and lights it can take more than five minutes to cross the two streets. It always seems like when I get to that intersection, my bus is already at the stop. Which means it’s long gone by the time I cross the two streets.

Seriously. If that bus were a football and I were Charlie Brown, the traffic lights would be Lucy van Pelt. And this would be an honest-to-goodness sports metaphor, albeit a sports metaphor filtered through a half-century-old pop-culture trope. But I’m a big homo. So: baby steps.

Last month I decided to quantify just how often this happens to me, so I randomly picked a day when I missed my bus and I started counting. And last night I hit my 20th missed bus in a row. Which—if not some sort of Chicago Transit Authority conspiracy theorist goldmine—is at least a CTA bad-timing record. And I didn’t even get a trophy. Or a cupcake. Or a box of kittens. Stupid CTA.

But this is apparently the last week for my bus to mock me and laugh derisively as it leaves me in its dust; it’s one of the 39 routes being eliminated by the CTA (who blames everything on state budget cuts) effective Monday.

Which means longer walks to less-convenient buses or even longer walks to sardine-packed trains for me. And no doubt staggering losses in worker productivity across Chicago. Honestly, it seems reliable public transportation should be one of any metropolis’ paramount investments—it ensures workers spend time generating revenue instead of commuting, it reduces deterioration of roads and other infrastructures, it promotes tourism and it raises the general quality of life (and, most likely, property values and tax revenues as well). But I’m no George W. Bush, so I won’t even begin to pretend that I know how to manage a government or a budget or the minimum satisfaction requirements of a citizenry.

On the other hand, I am the fiancé of a huge copycat who was so jealous of my leaving-my-phone-on-a-bus adventure last month that he left his phone on a train late last night. His phone has a loud, annoying ring, and after he called it a couple times when he got home, it suddenly started going right to voicemail. Which means that some train-riding Samaritan found his phone and turned it off so as not to be inconvenienced by any obligation for compassion or helpfulness or decency. Or karma, one would hope.

So in this pop-culture-cliché sports metaphor, the fiancé is Charlie Brown, the phone is the football and the Samaritan is Lucy van Pelt. And if we ever find this Lucy, she has some ’splainin’ to do.

You’re not going to believe this

I don’t really like running with music. I have this weird adorable little compulsion to run on the beat if I have a song blaring in my ears. Which is great when my iPod plays Hooked on Classics or the One Tin Soldier club mix. But when it cycles to a tender love ballad or anything from A Little Night Music, I mess up my groove and trip all over myself. So I usually run with nothing but my wandering imagination to keep myself occupied.

And while my wandering imagination takes me to some weird places—I recently found myself explaining direct-mail basics to a federal grand jury—it works for me. And nobody gets hurt. So I stick with it. But that’s not the part you’re not going to believe.

You see, on this morning’s run as I fought to ignore the foreboding tightness in my left hamstring, my mind wandered to the bus I would be catching to go to work in an hour. In the little story playing out in my head, the bus driver recognizes me when I get on, asks me if I’d lost something the day before, and hands me my poor little homesick phone. And everybody likes a happy ending, so I kept replaying the story over and over in my head for five hamstringy miles. But still, that’s not the part you’re not going to believe.

My bus route starts a block north of our condo, so I’m usually the first person on my bus in the morning. I have to get off downtown when the bus is its most crowded, so I always sit in the same seat right across from the back door so I can beat a hasty exit through the morning throngs. When I got on the bus this morning, the bus driver wasn’t the driver I’d had yesterday. In fact, she wasn’t even one of the three or four drivers I’ve come to recognize on my route. She was pleasant and smiley, but she didn’t hand me my damn phone. No biggie, I thought. There’s still a minuscule chance the phone will be sitting in my seat when I get back there.

Armed with this delusion, I lurched my way to the back of the bus as it rumbled down the street. And when I got to my seat—and here finally is the part you’re not going to believe—there was a goddamned cell phone sitting right where I usually plop my butt. True story!

Unfortunately, the damn thing wasn’t mine.

But, flush with the idea that karma is a benevolent mistress, I rushed the phone up to the bus driver so she could turn it into the CTA’s lost and found. And when I got to work this morning I called the CTA’s lost and found myself to reap my sweet reward.

But my reward wasn’t a triumphant reunion with my poor little phone. No! It was the smack-in-the-face reality that my phone had never been turned in. Karma, it turns out, is a fickle little bitch.

And she’s totally gonna suffer the consequences when I rat her out to the federal grand jury.

Why today is sucking

I spilled yogurt on my shirt when I got to work, so I look kind of clumsy and disheveled today.

Oh, and I left my cell phone on the bus this morning. I had the ringer off so as not to disturb the other bus riders, but also so as not to have any of them hear my phone ring the hundreds of times I’ve called it hoping to find a friendly neighborhood Chicagoan who could help get my phone back to me.

And I don’t even want to think about the hundreds of non-backed-up phone numbers I’ve lost. Or the adorable text messages from the fiancé that I couldn’t bring myself to delete. Ugh.

I figure the phone is lost to the ages, so I called Verizon to at least disable it so bus-riding agents of evil wouldn’t run up exorbitant phone bills calling Dick Cheney. The Verizon operator was very helpful until we got to the part where I asked her if I’d have to pay full price for a replacement phone or if I’d get some sort of existing-customer discount. She blabbered out three corporate-speak answers involving plan names and code numbers and all kinds of other stuff that I as a consumer was guaranteed not to understand before I finally had to put it as simply as possible: If I go to a Verizon store today and get a new phone, will I have to pay full price—yes or no? Unfortunately, she was still incapable of providing an answer. Though I suspect her confusion translated to yes.

On the suddenly bright side, my phone battery is so crappy it doesn’t hold a charge for more than a day, so by sundown nobody will be able to read my mushy text messages or access my dear friend Paris Hilton’s number and interrupt her busy life with meaningless chatter. So there’s that.

And when I get a new phone, maybe it will have a better camera in it so the photos I post here won’t look like they were taken by an astigmatic squirrel. So it looks like you-all owe me a big thank-you for being so irresponsible.

Bus update

So today I woke up late. This happens a lot. Because I’m a morning person in the same way Newt Gingrich is a reliable husband. But today I was really late; I hit my snooze button six times, which at nine-minute snooze intervals equals almost an entire hour of lost begging in the NPR fund drive.

And by the time I got myself dolled up for work and standing at my bus stop, it still took about 15 minutes for a bus to show up. Which means I had 15 minutes to take what is usually a 35-minute ride if I was going to make it to my morning staff meeting.

And then something weird happened: Our country elected an inarticulate, semi-literate, draft-dodging, opportunistically religious boob to be president two terms in a row. Oh, wait … that’s something weird that happened a couple years ago. The thing that happened this morning that was so weird is this: The bus climbed on Lake Shore Drive and went express a half a mile early. And then there was no traffic whatsoever to slow us down. And I actually made it to my staff meeting. I didn’t get my favorite chair, so the day is basically ruined, but my magical powers over space and time actually worked this morning and in a way I was rewarded for being a lazy, unmotivated slug.

And … um … that’s the end of my story. I wish I had something more interesting to share, but it’s all I got.

Except this: I didn’t get a seat on the bus, so if Rush Limbaugh was even there I didn’t have to sit next to him. So even though my hands are probably crawling with germs from holding on to the don’t-fall-over pole, my virtue—at least as far as being defiled by Drug-Addled Divorce Boy goes—remains intact.

Bus luck

Thursday: Our bus bottomed out after I got on. Seriously. As soon as we boarded at my stop and the bus pulled away, it made this horrible scraping sound on the pavement. So we had to get off and wait for a new bus. And I had to lay off the doughnuts for a whole day.

Friday: I got stuck waiting with Impatient Bus Lady, who insisted on doing her bus waiting in the middle of the street.

Monday: The bus didn’t come for 35 minutes. It was hot. There is no cool, shady, spa-like shelter featuring oily bodybuilders wafting bergamot-scented palm fronds at my stop for some reason. So I was a sweaty, sticky mess by the time I finally rolled into work. Just in time for lunch.

Today: Our brakes locked up three stops after I got on. The driver couldn’t make the bus move, though her jerky attempts to get going made us all a bit queasy. So we had to get off, find our sea legs and wait for another bus.

Tomorrow: At the rate I’m going, I’ll probably end up sitting next to a sweaty Rush Limbaugh. And you know that bitch is gonna be a seat hog. And as a drug-addled divorce junkie, he’s probably gonna be all hands.

Dear lady in the wispy skirt at my bus stop this morning,

I know that waiting for the bus can be boring and sometimes even frustrating. And since there is no bench or shelter at our stop, we can’t even lounge in the shade while we wait. But what was so compelling about knowing when the bus was coming this morning that you felt justified to stand in the street craning your neck while you waited for it?

We know that getting on that bus was important to you. Your audible sighs and incessant pacing around the intersection made your needs more than clear.

But what did standing in the middle of the street really buy you? Do you enjoy elevating the possibility of car-on-pedestrian accidents? Do you like watching cars swerve into each other to avoid hitting you? Do you like the sound of honking? Did you somehow make the bus come faster?

Does it make you feel extra-important knowing you’ll be the first person at your bus stop to know when the bus is coming?

P.S. That dress needs a slip. Everyone who gave you the evil eye this morning got a pretty good glimpse of your lady business in return.

How not to ride a crowded bus

Buy one of these goddamn things right before you get on:

I worked late enough tonight that I missed the last express bus that runs by my office. So I had to schlep to Michigan Avenue to catch an express bus there … and since I had to walk right by H20+ to get to a bus stop, I decided to stop in and get some face moisturizer with a high SPF just like my dermatologist instructed me to start using in March.

The moisturizer I bought was right next to some revolutionary anti-wrinkle stuff that smelled really nice even though it cost the equivalent of three cab rides home from work. But I'm 39 now, and I'm prone to start wrinkling. One of these days. So I bought it too. And since I had my credit cards out I thought I might as well stock up on some of my favorite H20+ spa products, which were 1) on sale and 2) on sale only when you buy them in some freakishly huge two-and-a-half-foot-long wooden display box for some reason. And the moment I squeezed myself into the bus with the damn thing I knew I was bound to hit someone with it before I got home.

Sure enough, once I got it wedged vertically between my legs as I stood in the crowded aisle, it toppled over as we all tried to move back to make room for more passengers. And it landed right on the flip-flopped foot of a woman who made a very painful-sounding OW! noise and looked genuinely hurt as I apologized to her. But she was one of those passengers who refused to move directly to the back of the bus when she got on, instead inching back every stop and forcing the rest of us to inch along with her. I'm not saying she deserved to be crippled by a freakishly long box of skin-care products, but if she had moved to the back of the bus the moment she boarded, I wouldn't have been forced to waddle down the aisle over and over again with the thing wedged between my legs like some egg-bearing penguin, eventually allowing it to become dislodged and dangerous.

If that weren't enough, I banged a kid squarely on the side of the head with it when I got off the bus. Again, I'm not saying he deserved to be a victim of spa-product battery, but he was sitting in an empty double seat bent over a video game with his feet and his whole torso in the aisle. If he'd been sitting upright in the chair like a more evolved bus passenger, his head would probably still be attached to his body and I wouldn't have this unsightly dent in my freakishly huge two-and-a-half-foot-long wooden display box.

But at least I’ll have younger-looking skin. Starting tomorrow, no doubt. I'll be like totally dewy and desirable despite my physical barriers to beauty. Which is more than I can say for the crippled lady and the denty-headed kid I saw on my bus tonight.