Train Ride

　
So I am sitting on the floor, on a slow train to New York.

An elder lady just lied to 5 people who asked for the seat next to her, “My husband is coming back”. She finally gave in, and put her feet on the floor instead of the other seat. It’s either that or the lady who sits next to her now is sitting on her imaginary husband’s lap.

Anyway, for anybody who has no issue sitting on the floor, the number of seating option became infinite.

This kind of reminds me when one of my high school buddies was depressed because he just realized he was bi-sexual. He had been teased by everybody for being too feminine for years. It was not a shock to any of us that he likes guys. However apparently he was surprised by it. To ease his pain, a wise friend congratulated him that he just doubled his options in life.

He later turned full-time gay, of course. I hope he wasn’t surprised again, because we weren’t.

Finally I got a seat. I like riding trains, especially instead of flying. Being a statistical person, I believe everything in life is statistics, including the risk of train riding. However I always feel that I am not an individual, but a percentage when I travel by air. I hope that I would always be the 99.999% that comes back to the ground in one piece, not the unfortunate 0.001%.

My company lost one of the founders at the Pan-Am incident in 1988.

Unfortunate Stanley was the childhood friend of The Other Stanley, who is the chairman of the company today. They were both extremely smart. Being the best friend of each other, they had worked on many different things together through their life. They founded the company, one of their joint ventures and adventures, 30 years ago.

When their business finally started to take off so they weren’t poor anymore, Unfortunate Stanley told The Other Stanley his secret plan: one day he would just take enough money and leave everybody behind. No family, no work, just himself.

So even as today, The Other Stanley is still not sure whether his buddy was on the plane. Maybe he was not the unfortunate one after all. Maybe he owns several islands in the Caribbean’s and has 5 wives.

Anyway people always have their own particular issues with one or two public transportation systems. Air travel has never been my favorite. A friend of mine talked about her fear of missing the train stop a lot. She would remind people that she took off the train too early when she first travelled by herself at the age of 12 or 13, almost every time the subject of train ride was brought up. It must have become a deep-tissue nightmare for her. If I have a time machine, to find that poor little girl and tell her to wait couple more stops would be one of the things on my to-do-list.

I don’t really have a long to-do-list for the time machine scenario. I certainly have a long list for invisible cloak or a device that can freeze other people. Not sure how many of the things on my list are legal though. Time machine is not that practical for me --- not because I do not have many regrets in life. I think I do. However, I am sure for most of things I regretted in life, I could not do any better even if I get a second chance. I am very confident of my inabilities and lack of intelligence. And I am not really interested in meeting dinosaurs.