Now I know how Odysseus Felt

Today I read the following articles, which I link to for your amusement:
Article the first and Article the second

I made, tonight, a very poor strategic decision, travel-wise, which I will now share with you. I decided that I would travel from Berkeley to Palo Alto on public transit after eating dinner. Then I got roped into watching City Confidential (an extremely guilty pleasure) and 5 minutes of Law & Order. At this point, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just head out, my total lack of foreknowledge of public transit schedules notwithstanding.

Unfortunately, those five minutes of Law & Order (sweet, sweet, Law & Order) made me miss the a BART train. So I spent ten extra minutes sitting around waiting for the train. Then I had to transfer, twice. Extra cost: 15 minutes. Finally, I arrived at the first waystation on my journey, the Millbrae Caltrain depot.

Those extra five minutes of Law & Order (sweet, sweet, Law & Order) came back to bite me again, as I missed the Caltrain by four minutes. And with the lateness of the hour, I cursed my fate and settled in for an 85 minute wait for the next train. At this point, I noticed a nearby cab. The sticker price of a cab ride where I was going, however, was $40, which was more than I cared to spend.

Stupid decision? Probably. But at this point, I felt like the only aesthetically appropriate thing to do was to continue making stupid decisions until one of them paid off. And, as far as I could tell, the stupidest thing I could do was to sit down on a bench, there in the cold, and pull out a book to read. Which is exactly what I did, highlighting random passages at will from Braudel's The Mediterranean until the train arrived. I also took a short break to call an angel of mercy, who obligingly picked me up at the Caltrain in Palo Alto, saving me approximately 30 minutes in transit time. A favor which I promptly repaid, I might add, by unintentionally crushing his confidence.

Regular travel time: 2 hours, 10-20 minutes
Total travel time: nigh-on 4 hours

Needless to say, I could have massacred a hundred suitors or more when I finally returned home. In the absence of suitors, however, I settled for massacring another 80 pages of Braudel. Highlights of my trip home tonight included:

[1] Various members of the Cal band, traveling God-knows-where at 8 on a Monday night on public transit, complete with instruments. I counted one saxophone, one piccolo, a couple of clarinets and a flugelhorn.

[2] A physically imposing, obviously chemically-altered young man wearing a Scarface jacket, muttering to himself, talking in a singsong voice about finding $100 on the sidewalk and spending it on crack, going on a five minute rant in which he repeated the phrase, "Spare change" with various intonations and exaggerated emphases on different sounds and syllables. Seriously, the limit of how crazy his behavior was is beyond me to articulate for you at this point. He had the very poor taste to sit right behind me while doing this, leading me to wonder if he was going to kill me just for the hell of it. Especially when he started asking, "Would you be willing to die for another person?" and then giggling and laughing. As a result of this guy, I was forced to disembark the train before I could find out where [1] was going. When he started looking at the anti-terrorism signs on the train and reading them aloud ("If you see anything strange on the train... like me, ha ha ha... [switching to falsetto child's voice] be sure to call the authorities at once...") I decided the time had come for me to switch trains about eight stations early. So I did.

[3] A cab driver who might or might not have been trying to talk a fare out of me while waiting for the CalTrain. After I approached one cabbie about the fare to P.A. ($45, then $40), I decided to wait it out. At this point, the gentleman in question (a different cabbie in his late twenties, clean-shaven, jockish) approached me and began making conversation. I think he was just being friendly, but I can't be sure.
[3a] After telling Cabbie #2 that I study "Medieval Europe" his response, without missing a beat: "Oh, you mean the Renaissance?"

Good times. Good, good times.