Tag: commute

When you give up your seat to an old woman and a dude jumps in and starts to furiously write in his beautiful notebook.

Maybe he is a writer and the art is worth it.

The days are already short enough that it is dark when I get home.

When you arrive home after midnight with a sh.tload of luggage and a cranky baby, and home greets you with a snaking taxi line with a helpful sign of 30 min estimate, and thinking that you’d just throw money at it and take Lyft despite surge pricing, and first a dude named Shakhzod, then a dude named Saqib, both cancel your rides after making you wait for them as they learn the unfashionable address of you are going.

And of course there are delays on every train line this morning, and of course the platform is thoroughly packed.

It’s a perfect day that smells like fall for the first time. I am delirious with caffeine and sleep-deprivation. L turned one today. I also just got a new niece. Everyone is very nice to me, even people in the snobbish and ridiculously expensive flower shop. It’s a pretty perfect day.

Morning calculus: daycare opens at 8. My work starts, officially, at 9.
If I drop L off at open, by 8:15 I’m at the subway station. If the trains
are like today, it arrives at the station at 8:30. It takes 40 minute for the meandering and packed F train to get to the office.

So, in the morning I’m already late.
Reverse that in the evening considering that the daycare closes at 6
(better than most).
There is no way we could afford to live closer to either daycare or work.

I’m lucky I have an option, unsanctioned officially, to work from home.
Also, I have zero career advancement prospects, which is understood by
everyone, and as a result care for work that warrants overtime work is not
expected (though I still end up working after L goes down because it is
against my nature not to care for what I do). So I manage to make this work
for now.

But wtf do all other parents do??? How can anyone who makes under, say,
$400k live in this city AND have children?

Perfect April sun, good-mood L smiling at subway strangers, an infectiously-happy Israeli girl at the French coffee place near the daycare singing along with music in the speaker, a man playing Chinese cello on the platform.

It doesn’t matter that I worked till past midnight last night on an utterly pointless project and woke up groggy from nightmares that involved Excel.

It’s going to be a good day.