Friday, April 24

I have frequently expressed my personal feelings on the Human Cube that is the Paris Metro in the morning... the other day, while I was being compressed between a woman with way too much perfume and an adolescent listening to Rihanna & T.I's "Live your life" way too loud on his iPod (yes, his), when I noticed the man in front of me had begun huffing and puffing in a most disgruntled way. He shimmied his shoulders with a look of panic, not unlike a battered wife, and began looking around at all of the horrible people who were clearly abusing his personal metro space. At this point he began muttering to himself, making annoyed little comments about how people "are" these days.

May I point out that while all of this is going on there's a pregnant woman behind me who can barely breathe and a 10 year old late for school who has one leg balanced on the door frame in an attempt to create more space, not to mention the fact that the movement Disgruntled Man's shoulder shimmy was primarily ricocheting onto my face. After about 4 metro stops like this, he began to raise his "distress level," by which of course I mean "volume." The huffing and puffing turned into a whiny tantrum as he pushed his body in all directions trying to just get the Parisians off of him... except: this man clearly neglected to make the basic observation that THE PARIS METRO IS FULL DURING MORNING COMMUTE. He failed to acknowledge that he is in no way special, and in no way deserves more space than the 80 year-old woman who is holding her cane against the ceiling so that it doesn't get randomly thrown out of the train car.

People like this make me crazy. Or perhaps I should say amused, because it's not worth the effort to go crazy (or as we say in French pete les plombs). People who feel that they are superior enough to get their panties all in a bunch when they are treated just like everyone else, but at the same time don't have the money or initiative to take a taxi. Or walk. Or ride a bike. I mean seriously, Paris isn't that big. Which of course brings us to:

Whiny metro turd
I cannot create more space
Where there is none left