I took a cab today to 11th avenue from 5th avenue. It was rainy and I didn’t want to ruin my hair. My hair is perpetually bad and frizzy so when I actually have nice hair I am protective of it. I was also running late for a meeting. I rarely take cabs & these are the 2 reasons why:

Picture it: a sloppy, wet, gray day sometime in mid-December in Manhattan. It was cold and gross on those midtown sidewalks. Sleeping in felt so right. Then I realized that vacation had not begun quite yet. I jumped out of bed, turned the printer on and zapped out 12 pages of a final paper before the sweet repose of vacation could consume me. The words of my professor burning in the back of my mind, “If you are 1 minute late, this paper grade will go down.” Time check: 11 minutes until this paper is officially late. I hopped a cab around 57th and urged him to go faster. He was not listening to me, so I thought, as he was squawking on his cell phone, without a headset. I told him there was an extra juicy tip in it for him if he could make this tin can go any faster. Needless to say he floored it, all while I implored him to increase the speed. “Please, can’t you make this go faster?” “It is really, really important that I get there quickly.” “Don’t slow down! That light is a stale yellow!” I assume he was turning around to yell at me for being such a pain in the behind when SMACK!. We side-swiped another cab, sitting on the shoulder. The cabbie looked at me, my mouth open in an “Ooo, look what you did” position. He sped away. Our post-collision conversation:

“You just hit someone! You need to go back!”

“You! No more talking in my cab! You don’t talk in my cab!”

“But… but you just had an accident.”

“Here is your stop. Get out of my cab!”

Okay Mr. Crank-pot. Sheesh. No big tip for you.

I was not late to turn in my paper and my professor had no clue how awesome my paper’s little adventure was that morning.

Picture this one: sweaty girl, late for voice lesson, mid-July, changing into a tank top that has no falafel grease stain on the left boob in the back of a minivan cab. Okay. That evening I had the pleasure of riding with the one cabbie who wanted to chat. I tried to end our conversation so he would stop looking at me via the rearview mirror, lest we hit a bump and one of the ladies should pop out while he watched. Not only did my cabbie talk, incessantly, but he wanted to educate me about the reality and importance of time travel. Yeah, time travel. He also told me that he likes to watch people. Creepy, no? He said he’s seen a lot of regular people and a lot of time-travelers. He could tell the difference. Not even I have that gift… Then he asked if I was interested in time travel. I said I was. He asked if I was interested enough to try it. Now all I could think was “it likes to put the lotion on its skin,” so I tried to speak with neutral phrases that would not upset my driver to drive me to his basement in New Jersey. We rode on and he rambled out some mathematical phrase that I could never understand, even if I spoke crazy cabbie talk, taking into account the dimensions of our present time overlapping the past and the future. It all started to get genuinely interesting, even if it was mad, when I finally got to my teacher’s studio. Blast! I guess I’ll never unlock the secrets of time travel.