Agitated From Inside an Amtrak Train

So I’m sitting back and actually managing to relax on the absurdly overpriced express train from Boston back to New York when every travelers worst nightmare – two bleached-blonde children under the age of five are plopped down in front of me. The parents then notice I’m actually sitting at the four-person table and move on in anyway.

“I’ll move so you can all sit together,” I offer.

“No, no it’s okay,” the unusually good-looking father says. I’m attracted to him. This is wrong. Now I really have to move.

“No I will,” I insist.

“You don’t have to,” the mother chimes, “but you might want to,” she adds as her children begin to ravage a bag of pretzels apart like lions would a wilder beast.

I try to curb my black hatred for traveling families by attempting to remind myself that I one day will similarly have blonde, germ-encrusted children and will have to endure the unfriendly reality which is that people in every train, plane and bus would like to see me and my offspring dead on skewers. So I try to be nice and not give them my ‘stop in your tracks devil bitch stare’ that I perfected on a really long school bus trip in high school and move.

I transfer back a foursome table, the perfect position from which to observe the parents exchange a look of dread when they noticed the “Quiet Car” banners hanging from the train car’s ceilings. Not only had they kicked an innocent passenger out of her seat, but they were now settled in the one area of the train that would guarantee constant disapproving glares from everyone around them. Since the unfriendly Amtrak attendant had already announced five times that the train was sold out, and, “could everyone move all luggage from the seats beside them to make room for fellow passengers,” there was no way this family could feasibly move to another car with the hope of sitting together. They were stuck.

So now I’m seated next to a nice Asian woman reading (surprise surprise) Harry Potter. I just don’t get it. Am I the only person on the planet who didn’t gleefully jump on the J.K. Rowling bandwagon? Why are even adults obsessed with this stuff? I read the very first Potter book almost a decade ago and thought it was good, not great, and definitely not compelling enough for me to read the next seven in the series or stay overnight in a sleeping bag in front of Barnes and Noble in Times Square to get my hands on it before my friends. I entered a bookshop this weekend looking for an old best seller called ‘Magus’ that everyone’s recommended I read before my upcoming trip to Greece. When I asked the woman at the cashier for a book that I hadn’t found on the shelves, she cut off my request by pointing to her left. Was she deaf and pointing for me to speak to her colleague? No. She was silently directing me to a disgustingly large pyramid of Harry Potter books, assuming that wizards and broomsticks were what I was after. Geez. I’m looking at my train mate’s pages right now and there’s a character called Xenophilius. How can grown adults ingest this stuff with such carnal pleasure? Or am I the weirdo for not being intensely invested in little Harry’s survival?

Later, when my Harry Potter-reading train mate got up to go to the bathroom and left the book behind, I noticed she’d removed the front flap – so from everyone else’s perspective she seemed to be reading an anonymous book. So she WAS embarrassed that she was wolfing down the novel like a drug addict on the weekend of its release. My respect for her went up twenty points.

On my other side, is a woman in neon green pants and pink nails so bright that they hurt my eyes. She’s been reading the newspaper for almost three hours. How do people manage to do this? I’m newspaper-phobic. They make irritating crinkling sounds and stain my hands grey. The New York Times online is all I can handle.

The good news is the parents have settled their obnoxiously cute kids in front of an Apple computer with a double pair of headsets, and the children are now silently enthralled with whatever entertainment daddy put on the screen. The father’s now chilled out enjoying his iPod and the mom’s reading a horror paperback novel. I can’t exactly see, but I think the kids’ headsets are Bose. Talk about a 21st century family.

Next I look down at my own reading material, the July issue of Allure that my Barbie-doll mother slipped in my bag after chastising my unwashed hair and overgrown eyebrows all weekend. I woke up Sunday morning to her plucking them (plucking’s her favorite pastime). See, my mother finds the fact that I only get dressed up and put on make up if I’m going to a nightclub or going to have sex unacceptable. She wants me totally shaven, in Chanel with blow-dried hair ALL the time. The magazine she gave me is currently open to a page with an article entitled “How To Wear Bright Colors.” Is this whole beauty magazine thing not totally absurd? I mean, how do your wear bright colors?? You put them on!! It’s called dressing ourselves; many of us have nearly mastered it.

I flip to the next page which is an article about boutique owner Christiane Celle who opened that hideous chain of stores Calypso. The only place she could afford to put her SoHo boutique is on an unfashionable strip of Lafayette Street. I walked in there once to pretend to look for clothes when seeking an air-conditioned escape from the New York heat on an especially humid walk to Union Square. Everything in the store looked like boho maternity clothes with really pasty, pale colors and gross visible stitching. From this magazine article, I learn her first store was in St Barts, that she draws “inspiration” from India, and that she’s launching her own fragrance line. Why, why, why does every wanna-be / has-been on the planet insist on creating their own perfume? I really wish they’d stop. I’m surprised the entire fragrance business manages to sustain any kind of profit with new scents coming out right and left faster than bad movie releases. I only wear perfume on special occasions, so I still have bottles from four years ago. Who really buys perfume? You can’t even get it for people as a gift since you have no idea what scents they think attract the opposite sex and what scents make them hurl. According to Celle, “to go without fragrance would be like not brushing my teeth.” I guess that makes me a Neanderthal. Please, nobody alert my mom…