The Subway Solution

Now that I'm living in a big ole' metropolis again I'm faced with that urban phenomenon known as the commute. Since Chapel Hill was a tiny town that I could stroll from end to end and my London-living self is too poor to afford the tube on a regular basis, I'm not normally faced with the daily wiling away of minutes on a small underground train. I'm trying to use them productively. 

Apt time for some casual introspective existentialism you might think, or at least a quick sweep around brain-crevices so I turn up at work with the semblance of someone whose mental affairs are in order. Not so. Instead I spend the 25 minute commute listening to Azelia Banks' 1991 EP on repeat whilst crafting intricate dance routines requiring levels of flexibility I haven’t been in possession of since grade 4 Acrobatics, 2007. The choreography also includes my word perfect rap stylings, a feat much more achievable since I actually do know every single syllable of 212. Oddly enough playing a song 200 times will do that to a girl.

However, despite a brief period of what can only be termed study-abroad skankery, I’m still innocent enough that I comprehend approximately 12.7% of exactly what it is Ms Banks is getting at. So I felt it was probably time to start utilising those subterranean seconds more wisely. With this in mind I hopped into Barnes and Noble the other day (I need to get my second-hand on I know, but I’d never actually been into one of these word-warehouses before so I wanted to check it out…and perhaps see if I could find the Tom Hanks to my Meg Ryan in the process).

Being a literature student I always have a novel or 3 on the go but I get so nerdily into books that after 20 minutes with my head stuck in one I find it somewhat difficult to emerge. I doubt Nylon would appreciate me turning up half there, half off in the deep south circa 1920 struggling with an identity crisis along with Faulkner’s Joe Christmas. Plus there’s the small matter that a good book is so real to me I get scared that if I put it down for the day it'll plod so far on without me I’ll return to pages sprinkled with 5 o'clock stubble.

The solution to this, I have found, is a pocket-sized book (if your pockets were originally intended to house vast quantities of cash, keys and a foot-long sub) containing 50 great short stories. This is not to say that everyone’s favourite purple-haired foul-mouther hasn’t got her literary merits (rapgenius.com has now kindly provided me with an enlightening 212 sparknotes), but somehow polishing of a juicy bit of Joyce and a slice of Carson McCullers en route home is a little more satisfying.