Two days in a row, now, my commute has taken half an hour longer than it usually does. Yesterday I sat on the 3 for an extraordinarily long time between 72nd St and 42nd St (it may have seemed longer than it really was due to the Captain Body Odor effect), and then somewhere south of 14th St the train decided not to be a 3 anymore at all, so I had to get off and wait for my third train of the morning. (I always change from the 1 to the 2 or 3 somewhere uptown.)

This morning, Chris and I got on the 1 only to be told it was being taken out of service at the next stop, along with the 9, 2, and 3 above 42nd St. We later found out that service was cut off on these lines because of a “suspicious package” at 79th St, but at the time it meant we had to get off at the next stop, walk east to the A, and pay two more fares. And the thing we keep remembering is that we’re told fares are either going to go up again (they recently went from $1.50 to $2 per ride) or the discounts you get by buying a card over $20 are going to be eliminated. It’s nice to know we get to pay more for increasingly fucked up service.

And now for something completely different: as I was waiting for the elevator in the lobby of my building when I finally arrived at work, a little hipster twentysomething asked me how I got my iPod remote to stay on the strap of my purse, which was puzzling, but it turns out that she’d had a remote for six months without realizing that it has a little clip on the back. She had had the wire for hers wound in an elaborate manner up the entire length of her purse strap, all so that the remote could rest precariously in the middle of the tangle. I wonder if she has the same problem figuring out other things, like belt loops and doorknobs?