Painting my world colorful

Somebody turned the color off here.  This has been my view every day for the last week: 

One day the great outdoors was full of reds, yellows, greens, and blues, and the next, the sky became grey and snow covered everything.  And because our apartment complex doesn't believe in color, I look out our window and feel like I'm in the middle of the film Pleasantville.  Except neither Don Knotts nor Paul Walker are here, so it's not nearly as interesting.  There are no orange pumpkins, no green and red Christmas wreaths, no rainbow Christmas lights, no burgundy flowers, no colorfully patterned curtains in windows to see.  This is largely because the apartment complex is run by someone who is clearly in desperate need of a Hallmark Christmas Movie grinch makeover.  Not even colorful curtains are allowed to show on the outside, because every unit must present a uniform (read: drab and boring) appearance.  Why?  Well, clearly because the owner is miserable and lacks imagination or creativity or joy and wants to make everyone else miserable and uniform, too.  That's all I can think of.  I do see a red bike across the way in front of someone's door right now, but I also see a note from management on their door... probably telling them no red bikes allowed. Now, if the bike were black and white, it might be a different story....

I tried to rectify the lack of color yesterday by hanging Christmas lights around our apartment.  All my life I've been a firm believer that Christmas decorations should not be hung until after Thanksgiving, and I have always cringed at the early onset of Christmas carols on the radio and decorations everywhere the day after Halloween, believing that the decorations lose their special feeling if the period is extended too long.  But nope, not this year.  This year, I want color, color, color.  Starting now.  Of course, our apartment complex doesn't just believe in uniformity on the outside where people (WHO?  What people?  The apartments don't even face a public street...) might see color; they also restrict decorating on the inside.  No screws, no nails, no tape, no no-damage Command hooks or adhesives.... The rules are stricter than a dorm room.  Never being one to follow stupid rules made for no reason but a power trip, when my husband said, "We can't hang Christmas lights this year," I immediately replied, "Of course we can.  We use tape."

"But they don't allow tape."

"How are they going to know?  We use tape every year.  It doesn't leave any marks."

My mistake was in thinking Mr. Grinch hadn't prepared for such rule-defying Christmas-light-loving rebels as I.  The walls don't take tape. They're painted with some sort of Christmas-hating, tape-resistant, adhesive-repelling layer.

So there are no Christmas lights up (though I have not given up.  Next not-allowed step: Command hooks).

There is, however, a colorful waterfall calendar in my office... hung with... a nail. My husband put the nail in.  I'm teaching him to disobey Grinch rules.  If Reese Witherspoon could make the people of Pleasantville turn their world colorful, so can I.

Fortunately, my cat is colorful.  He might appear to be white and grey to most people, but I see him in fiery reds, vibrant greens, and playful yellows and oranges.  With polka dots and rainbows and zebra stripes.  And in tie-dye.  So that helps.

Unfortunately, dance classes here are also in black and white.  Aside from the monochrome black everyone wears, there is no passion, no intensity, no energetic buzz going through class.  Students barely (if ever) break a sweat.  There are no bright red leotards designed to stand out, no one pushing beyond their ability, burning to be noticed, no heightened emotions as dancers and music become one.  The music is heavy and plodding and rarely fitted to the dance.  The students seem alternately bored and uninterested (or in my case, intensely frustrated).  What used to be the most colorful part of my day has become the most painfully grey part.

So I give myself dance class at home, making as much color on my own as I can.  But color is better when there are other people involved to help paint the world.  Other people can think up entirely new colors, painting their own patterns and hues across a grey field, making it so much richer than one person's palette.  I went to a class in Detroit a couple weeks ago, and the room was full of every color in the rainbow.  I'm trying to start my own adult ballet class here, as I hear from others in the city who feel the same way.  But while I try to get that sorted out, I still need my daily dose of fiery red.

So what did I do?

I signed up for a boxing class.  Boxing is colorful.  If anyone in Pleasantville went to a boxing gym, I'm pretty sure their first punch would leave a streak of color.

So since I can't paint my world with Christmas lights or pointe shoes or dancing heels (yet), this Saturday I will paint my world with boxing gloves.  Because you can't keep a fighter down—or in black and white.

My first love letter to the MTA

I miss the MTA.

Nope, I don't need a psychological examination.  I'm not crazy.  I'm not being paid by the MTA with the money that should be going to improving the service I ranted about for a decade just like every other New Yorker.  I just really, really, passionately miss it.

"Ohmygosh I hate the MTA!!!!!" used to be one of my most-repeated phrases.  I'd stand on the platform for 20 minutes waiting for that N train out of Astoria.  Or the doors on a connecting express train across the platform would close JUST as the local train's doors opened at a station, ensuring we all had to wait 7-10 minutes for the next express.  Or my LIRR train would suddenly flash on the screen as being 18 minutes late 2 minutes before it was supposed to arrive, by which point I couldn't make it to work via the subway on time....  Or my subway train would just be trapped underground for 40 minutes due to signal problems before getting decommissioned and backing into a station, and then I'd realize that my phone was about to die and I had no idea how to get home, so I'd stop in a Sephora and paint my nails different shades of fluorescent pink with chunky glitter to make me feel better about being trapped in Manhattan in a snowstorm at night....

But then I moved to Grand Rapids, and the MTA now tops my list of things I miss, below dance classes, but above Sephoras on every corner and Dunkin' Donuts (seriously, western Michigan, what is up with the lack of Dunkin' Donuts here?  The slogan is "America runs on Dunkin'," not "America minus western Michigan runs on Dunkin'."  I had a ten-minute conversation at a bar with three people who live in this city trying to find someplace comparable, and the consensus is there isn't one.  I do not understand this.  But I digress).  And tied with sidewalks.  I miss sidewalks.  Never take sidewalks for granted if you're so lucky to have them.  Maybe Grand Rapids doesn't run on Dunkin' because then they'd be walking someplace with their coffee and doughnut and the sidewalk would just abruptly end and the coffee drinker would be like, "But I still have coffee left," and the sidewalk would be all, "Nope, I don't care, turn around and get back in your car and let the coffee spill on you while you drive because this is as far as I have randomly decided to go. Or walk by the side of this major road and get killed. Your choice."

You see, here, there's a bus system.  With an app.  The app, in theory, tells you where your bus is.  I live about ten minutes from a bus, which is scheduled to run about every 30 minutes.  In actuality, it's a complete guessing game when the bus will come.  Sometimes it's ten minutes early, sometimes it's ten minutes late, and I've learned not to be surprised if I'm waiting at a bus station and watching on the app as the bus pulls up and leaves but... there's no bus in front of me.  Or maybe it's a ghost bus.  Maybe the bus wanted a Dunkin' Donuts but there wasn't one so the bus wasted away due to lack of nourishment and now is a ghost that riders can't see....

Making things worse is that to get most places, unless it's on the same bus line (and there are 28 bus lines), I have to go downtown to go back out.  In theory, this would make going to a dance studio five miles north of me take 52 minutes.  In actuality, 100% of the time, I miss the transfer because the first bus gets in ten minutes late and the second bus leaves two minutes early.  So I have to get on the first leg one bus earlier than I should be.  Plus I have to leave 30 minutes before the bus is scheduled to leave in case it shows up way early.  So it takes me 2 1/2 hours to go five miles.  This beats (in a bad way) anything the MTA has ever done.

Then there was the time the bus driver held us hostage.  Two men who had annoyed her when they'd gotten on because they didn't speak English pulled the wire signaling a stop.  She didn't stop.  I pulled the wire for the next stop.  She didn't stop.  She passed a third stop, and the two men looked at me helplessly, and I wondered what Speed would look like set in Grand Rapids with a homeless man, two men who didn't speak English, a mother ignoring her baby as she hit on the pierced and mohawked stinky man across from her, a woman staring at me while she ate her candy bar slowly, and me.  Deciding I didn't care to see that movie, I ran to the front of the bus and looked at the driver like, "What the heck?"  

"Oh, is this where you wanted to get off?" she asked in a tone that could have been anywhere between space cadet and sarcasm.

"Well, actually two stops ago," I said.

She pulled to a stop on a street that, according to my app, wasn't even on the bus line.

"Have a nice day!" she said sweetly as the three of us got off and tried to figure out where we were and how to make it back to our intended stops.

Perhaps most surprisingly, I miss the MTA because of the... smell.  Yep, that's right.  If I'm on a stinky car on the subway, I can just go to another one.  Even if I'm on a stinky bus, there's always another bus right behind.  But not here.  Nope, trapped for 40 minutes with scents for which I can't even imagine the source assaulting my poor nose. 

So, whatever city you live in, if you're lucky enough to have public transportation that can get you where you need to go faster than a flight halfway across the country, then the next time you order a pumpkin spice coffee with a pumpkin spice doughnut and walk on the sidewalk to a metro stop to go on your way, savor it all.  It's not as bad as you think.