gag order

An unseasonably cold and rainy Monday morning is hard enough to endure - the least I think I should be able to ask of my fellow subway passengers on this or any other morning is relative silence. That, however, was not in the cards today. Two women around my age got on my train at Bergen St. (the stop immediately after mine) and began talking. As is the case every morning, at the next stop, Jay St./Borough Hall, about half the people on the car got off, while the rest of us scrambled for seats. If you don't get a seat at this point, you're basically standing up for half an hour, so learning how to box out the elderly or less physically fit is crucial, as is avoiding eye contact.

While I settled into my seat (which a middle-aged woman with a big backpack may or may not have had her eyes on) the two women continued their conversation while taking the seats directly behind and next to me. I was now in the crossfire and spent the rest of my commute turning up the volume on my iPod, getting gently bumped by the elbow of the louder and more obnoxious of the two women and resisting the temptation to test the real life application of some of the choke holds I've learned in jiu-jitsu over the last year. In my mind I saw myself gently letting go of this woman as her unconscious head bobbed forward, announcing to my fellow passengers, "It's O.K., she'll regain consciousness in a minute without knowing what happened." as they burst into subdued applause.

But being the avoider of conflict that I am, the best I could muster was passive aggressive angry looks and sighs, none of which were acknowledged. But this got me thinking - in lieu of the recent additions to the subway rules, why not make it illegal to talk louder than a whisper between the hours of 6-10AM? Would anyone be opposed to this? It would even solve the awkward situation of running into someone in the morning on the train and having to endure forced conversation. You would simply whisper, "call me, let's get together" and that would be that.

I enjoy starting my day in silence. I don't even like talking to my wife in the morning, so there's just no way I can handle listening to "he's like almost fifty - that's old enough to be her father" or "for real, son, I'm saying, I was mad angry, yo" before I've had my coffee. It's bad enough commuting to Midtown East (Manhattan's most boring neighborhood) and watching all the remotely interesting looking people get off the train one by one.

I guess the obvious solution here is that I need to find a way to either work from home or become a freelance something (which is basically why I'm in grad school). It's either that or wind up a headline in the NY Post that someone carelessly leans into someone else's personal space to read on the train in the morning. I can see it now: "Commuter Committed" or "Nine to Fiver looking at Five to Ten".