[URBAN NOTE] Hanging on the subway
Oct. 18th, 2005 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldTravelling south on the Yonge-University-Spadina line from Eglinton to Bloor-Yonge early Monday evening, I found myself sitting next to a woman a bit older than me, with long black hair and a modest dress and a wonderful smile, talking to herself. I nodded to her, and she responded by chatting with me about many things, about the differing type colours of different national releases of Cyndi Lauper's debut She's So Unusual and the Jewishness of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and her own interest in finding a sukkah and her explanation to me of what a sukkah was.
It's a truism that residents of metropolises home to millions are standoffish, that the default mode for a person embedded in a vast city is radical individualism. It's a truism that Torontonians are a bit of a cold bunch, not very spontaneous or very friendly. It's a truism that whatever else you do on a public transit system, you must never talk to someone you don't know. Imagine these three factors coming together and you'll know something of what it can be like to ride the TTC.
Travelling west on the Bloor-Danforth line from Bloor-Yonge to Dufferin later that evening, after some light reading at the Toronto Reference Library, I was standing across the car from someone a bit younger than me, of Hispanic descent, wearing overlarge pants and a monocoloured orange T-shirt and a blue pullover, aggressively trying to chat everyone and anyone up, looking for a smoke, looking to talk. He didn't get a smoke, and no one talked to him longer than they had to, pained grins and tensed muscles all around.
The one chatterer was seen as an irritation at worst; the other, I have to testify, as a threat at best. If you ride the TTC, you can't break out of the crowd by trying to develop a public personality unless everyone's prejudices are allayed. It wouldn't be proper otherwise.
It's a truism that residents of metropolises home to millions are standoffish, that the default mode for a person embedded in a vast city is radical individualism. It's a truism that Torontonians are a bit of a cold bunch, not very spontaneous or very friendly. It's a truism that whatever else you do on a public transit system, you must never talk to someone you don't know. Imagine these three factors coming together and you'll know something of what it can be like to ride the TTC.
Travelling west on the Bloor-Danforth line from Bloor-Yonge to Dufferin later that evening, after some light reading at the Toronto Reference Library, I was standing across the car from someone a bit younger than me, of Hispanic descent, wearing overlarge pants and a monocoloured orange T-shirt and a blue pullover, aggressively trying to chat everyone and anyone up, looking for a smoke, looking to talk. He didn't get a smoke, and no one talked to him longer than they had to, pained grins and tensed muscles all around.
The one chatterer was seen as an irritation at worst; the other, I have to testify, as a threat at best. If you ride the TTC, you can't break out of the crowd by trying to develop a public personality unless everyone's prejudices are allayed. It wouldn't be proper otherwise.
