21元 ($3.42) Taxi, to meet a friend for lunch; I was running late.

At first, traveling illegally is electrifying; even the dullest journeys become thrilling, suspenseful, dangerous.

Recently I was in Sydney on business, which is just the most amazing and douchiest sentence I've ever written. But I was, and on my first night I had plans to get drinks with the friend of a friend. I left the event venue (where they held boxing at the Olympics! God, I love the Olympics) a responsible amount of early, with Google Maps' assurance that all I needed to do was take the monorail one stop. I was willing to pay the unreasonable price of $5 for this because it was worth that much to me not to be lost in a foreign country at night. Come to think of it, that's probably the business model for all overpriced transit aimed mainly at tourists.

What we spend to get around.

I’m not suggesting everyone sell their Buick for a bus pass, or that buses are a far superior way of traveling. But once upon a time, I had to sell my car to pay off some traffic tickets and ended up having to rely on Kansas City's public transportation system to get around.

As a lesbian, I carry my keys on a carabiner in my right pocket. That way I can look cool and theoretically defend myself quickly (my rape whistle is on my keys, duh). In this same vein of thought, I don’t like to carry my MetroCard in my wallet because I don’t want to pull it out every time I get on the subway. Because thieves are clamoring for my wallet. So I generally carry it in my jacket or my back pocket.

The problem with this is that my keys poked a little hole in my MetroCard and eventually it stopped working. I found this out right after I had loaded $50 on it, and my train was rapidly approaching the station. The unhelpful little guy in the box tried it a few times and then shoved some paperwork in my hands with my still unusable card, so I had missed my train AND had to buy a new one. Nu uh, city government, you ain’t getting away with this!

So I just filled out the paperwork with my address the approximate amount on the card and why it wasn’t working. Also it’s free to send it!

I had almost completely forgotten about it and dismissed it as just more paperwork lost in the NYC municipal shuffle, but I checked my mail today and viola! A brand new card with 45 bucks on it!

 

Lib Tietjen lives in and knows everything about Brooklyn.

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