The Journal of a Pig

The ear buds for my iPhone crapped out last week. I think it had something to do with listening to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks at high levels to drown the sound of the subway. Regardless, they're no longer functional and with school, work, and jury duty getting in the way of everything, I haven't been able to purchase a new pair yet.

That means I've had nothing to listen to during my commute to and from work. I find that if I read an actual book on the subway I tend to space out and miss my stop. I'm not much of a magazine guy either, so I've been trying my best to make do with my Blackjack and Sudoku on my phone but there is only so much of that I can take before I get bored... So this morning, I decided to break out my trusty journal.

If you recall, I went on exhaustive internet search to find the right journal for me. I finally settled on the moleskine.

Anyway, it has served me faithfully since October of 2007. It's been dropped, stepped on, lost on at least one occasion that I can recall, been the victim of a devastating milk incident, and even been used as a weapon of mass destruction against the occasional insect intruder... it contains everything thing from sangria recipes to my experiences from El Salvador and Honduras.

As much as I love my journal, I tend to neglect it for weeks (sometimes even months) at a time. But the benefit to that neglect is that when come back to it and flip through the pages, I find entries that I only have a vague recollection of writing. It's a little like bumping into a long forgotten acquaintance.

This morning was no exception. I found two very similar entries written in January of this year. They were both written while on the subway, and both do a very good job of showing what sexist pigs men really are... or at least what a pig I really am.

The first one was about how I found myself sitting next to a crazy woman on the metro. She was praying out loud to Jesus, asking him to forgive her for using his name in vain. This went on for several stops. At one point she actually began to argue with either Jesus or herself that what she had done wasn't technically a sin because she had only thought the sinful utterance but not actually verbalized it.

Apparently she ended up getting off at the same stop as me and I found myself walking behind her. Once we got onto the escalator, she got into some sort of confrontation with an innocent bystander. The woman was obviously insane and probably dangerous... What was the grand conclusion I came to at the end of the that event?

I wrote: "for a crazy subway woman, she had a surprisingly nice ass..."

The second story --written just two days later-- had me sitting near a Muslim woman in a full burqa... The kind where all you can see is the eyes... The woman got a call on her cell phone and decided to put the phone inside the burqa so she could take the call. During the process of putting the phone in the burqa, 75% of her face became visible to me for a half-second.

What did I write about? Was it the about the injustice of men misconstruing religious material to oppress women and force them to cover their faces from the world? Was it about the uncomfortable reaction of other passengers to sitting near a fundamentalist Muslim on mass transportation? Was it about the startling contrast of old-world values and new-age technology? Nope... all I wrote was: "she was actually pretty hot under that burqa. It's probably a good thing she's wearing it or I might have tried to hit on her..."

Yep... I actually wrote those words down on paper.

Anyway, be sure and stop by tomorrow for the latest, "Life in the Fast (food) Lane," when I build my favorite dollar menu lunch combination.