I’m so tired. I had my Daily Show class yesterday and thought I’d give the Fung Wah (”Fiery Bus of Doom”) a try because 1) it’s a little cheaper than Greyhound; and 2) it leaves New York at 10:00 PM as opposed to having to wait for 12:30 AM for Greyhound, which gets in at 4:45, which makes it not worth it to drive home and then just have to get up in an hour, so last week, for instance, I just went to my office and went to sleep on the floor. Thankfully nobody noticed I was there when I woke up at 8:20 AM the next morning. Just had to go fix my face and pretend I was wearing a fresh outfit and had just arrived at work! Nobody was the wiser.
Anyway, the nice thing about the Fung Wah bus is that they have your name on a list and they actually watch out for you to make sure you show up. When you arrive, they let some other unseen person know that you are there. Which is fucking awesome, because I had to RUN from the Canal Street subway all the way up to the bus, which is near the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a long fucking way when you’re wearing loafers, carrying a 10 lb. bag of camera equipment and notebooks and your crappy feedback “Hey, nice job on your piece, except maybe for [list everything in the entire segment], and sliding all over the road because there is six inches of newly fallen snow over a mischievous little layer of ice. That ice was calling to me, “Fall here, fall here!” And I did a few times. I thought I seriously was going to have a heart attack by the time I got to the bus with 1 minute to spare. I was a block away waving at it like an idiot, just in case they happened to think, “Oh, we’re missing a person and there’s some crazy quasi-bag-lady chick waving at us, maybe she’s the ticketholder??” Yah right.
May I also mention: I got out of the subway (the wrong exit of course, meaning the one that was farther away than I needed to be) and didn’t know which way to go. So I asked two different people, one of whom was wearing a uniform of some kind–transit cop, bus driver, something–”Can you tell me which way is the Manhattan Bridge?” And NEITHER of them had any idea whasoever of what the “Manhattan Bridge” was. “You mean the Brooklyn Bridge, right?” NO Mr. Arm Badge, I do not mean the Brooklyn Bridge. The MB is on a map, there’s an entire area of New York named after it (”DUMBO” - Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), it’s a giant fucking bridge–and these two guys had no clue what I was looking for. Is it called something else to New Yorkers? If it is, then why did DUMBO come to be called DUMBO instead of DUTBABTWDKTNO (Down Under That Big-Ass Bridge That We Don’t Know The Name Of)? That’s pronounced Dut-bab-tood-kit-no, in case you were wondering. You would have thought I asked them how to find that big department store, Gimbal’s.
Anyway, so I huffed and puffed my way onto the Fung Wah bus. After making sure I wasn’t going to pop my aorta, I was pleased to see that very few people were on the bus so I got the whole last row–where there are three seats together instead of two–to myself. I then snuggled in, watched a couple episodes of The Tudors on my iPod, and eventually fell asleep. Point being, the Fung Wah bus is not worth it: it’s a little cheaper, but then you have to pay for the subway both ways ($4.00), plus you have to walk a fairly long way, fast, and worry the whole time that if you don’t make it you’re gonna be spending the night inside the Port Authority, which is where you’ll have to go after missing the Fung Wah because the Fung Wah doesn’t have a bus terminal, at least not that I could see. Just a lonely little row of chairs outside a Chinese convenience store. Which was closed.
Next stop, Boston, arriving at 3:00 AM, which is 1 hour longer than they said the trip would take. Then I had to take a taxi to my car, pay for 2 days parking (yes a “day” in Boston parking parlance is actually only 8-12 hours. Over that, you get charged for another “day.” I had also lost the ticket and wondered what they’d do about that but they only charged me for 2 “days” (11:30 AM to 3:15 AM the actual next day). Oh, and they hadn’t plowed the lot at all so I was pretty amazed I even got out of it. It’s a lot easier to drive in the snow when you know that even if you skid, you’re not going to hit anyone. Maybe I should try some wheelies sometime!
Then had to drive home, a 35-minute ride that took 1-1/4 hours. And I especially want to thank the goddamn fucking tailgater who just HAD to stay one car length behind me for about 8 miles when he had the whole fucking highway to pass me on. But NOOOOOOOOOO, he had to just stay on my ass. I was half wishing for a need to slam on the brakes just so I could make him crash into me. In Insurance Land, rear-end accidents are 100% the second driver’s fault. It would have been sweet, for a minute anyway.
I did get a mention in class of my OTS being good, which surprised me because we had to do two and I thought my other one was better. An “OTS” is one of those graphics on The Daily Show that they use to illustrate the piece that’s coming up–some kind of play on words or double-entendre that makes the whole piece funnier. He mentioned one of mine as being “good.” Before you think I’m all talented and shit, be aware that we all threw out a bunch during the class and most of the ones he dinged as either not funny or not appropriate were the ones I thought were some of the best, and I could have seen them all on TDS. But he said they’d never have made it. **puzzled**
So that’s why I’m tired. I cannot wait to get home and snuggle up under the comforter. Kitties missed me. I think.
