Buses

Every morning, I ride the bus to school from my dad's work, and every afternoon I ride the bus back from school. I never really realized this until reading The Mezzanine, but my mind wanders a lot on the bus. Until one day (maybe the second day of school) as I was riding the bus and letting my mind wander as usual, I didn't fully appreciate the wanderings of my mind or the wanderings and tangents in The Mezzanine. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading The Mezzanine. I just never realized how much the mind really does wander in a very short space of time. I never realized how many of the things I think about that are actually interesting, at least to me.

While I was on the bus, I found myself mostly thinking about social interactions and situations. I thought about the nature of bus rides, especially morning ones. For example, when I ride the bus in the morning, it is always an inherently independent and quiet activity. I began to consider what it would be like to ride the same bus as a teacher, or the parent of a friend, or some other person who I felt I had some obligation to talk to, but preferred not to. Would a conversation with one of those people be inevitably awkward or forced? Probably. I have been in a position similar to that before, in fact, and it was both forced and awkward, so now I tend to avoid that type of situation as much as possible.

So as I was sitting on the bus considering these extremely interesting thoughts, I realized that I was thinking in a way similar to Howie. I was surprised by this fact, and suddenly I fully understood Baker's (and Howie's) philosophy. I realized how interesting the social interactions on buses can be. Of course, during the course of the bus ride, I thought about other things, such as how the smell of olive oil reminds me of home (because my mom makes pasta all the time), and how nice it is to go to school when the weather is good (and how I am absolutely dreading the shorter, colder winter days).

I plan on writing my pastiche about a bus ride, though I plan to embellish that bus ride with thoughts from many bus rides, as I'm sure Howie did when he was writing his memoir about his elevator ride. I'm not entirely sure what this blog post is about--it's mostly just me writing down some of my ideas and planning to expand on them for my pastiche.

I guess what I discovered through all of this is that I'm actually really impressed that this novel has had such an impact on my way of thinking. It's sort of funny because back when we read Housekeeping, it had a similar effect on me, yet its philosophy is the complete opposite of The Mezzanine's; in fact, if Howie were to read it, I'm sure he would be deeply disturbed--though he may enjoy some aspects of it. It definitely does force you to slow down in the same way that his own book does. Now I've gotten onto a complete tangent (and I probably have The Mezzanine to thank for causing me to go off on tangents like this one). Maybe I'll pursue the comparison of Housekeeping and The Mezzanine in another post.