Happy post!
Now that I got the last post out of my system, I'm feeling remarkably better. I've actually been dealing with stress and family problems surprisingly well in the last two weeks. Things have been difficult lately, but it wasn't until today that I felt stressed out enough to bitch about them on livejournal, and I'm feeling back to normal faster than usual :) Some of it I'm sure it's because Hong Kong movies are thereupetic to my soul, but a lot of it was a phone call with enyka a couple of weeks ago and seeing her again last weekend. I wrote in an unfinished post about last weekend that she always grounds me and keeps above the miry pit of self-pity and melodrama, and I guess I'll have to replace that line now when I post it, but it's true. And seeing Essjayvee today also helped me feel more human and put things in perspective. I love my friends.

Anyways I wrote this on the train to Essjayvee's yesterday, when I was a in good mood, and I'm happy to say I'm feeling pretty good right now.

***

This one time I was on the Ottawa Public Tranpso bus, and there was this gigantic snarl of a traffic jam. Really, I should have gotten off and walked home. It would have been faster, an hour and a half to get home, but considering that I was stuck on the bus for two hours, yeah, faster. Of course I didn’t know I was going to be stuck for two hours. I’m sure you’ve all been there before – you think it may be a long time stuck in traffic, but you’re afraid the moment you get off the bus, it’s going to clear and everyone’s going to speed off right beside you.

I stayed on, going crazy because the bus never moved, didn’t even budge except maybe half an inch every ten minutes or so. People were grumbling, cars were honking below us, I sat there cursing myself for not having a book or some knitting with me.

And then I heard this song come out of nowhere, a man’s voice, clear but French accented, slow and curling like cigarette smoke. It sounded like a song from the fifties, one of those that you can imagine a man wooing his lover, though I tend to associate those kinds of songs with twisted acts of violence and murder where the soft crooning music floats above to contrast with the creepiness below (if you ever saw “the wall scene” in Angel’s Rm w/a vu, you know what I’m talkng about.) Naturally, me being me, I was creeped out, and trying to figure out where this song was coming from. It didn’t sound like it was coming from someone’s overloud ipod or MP3 player, or from outside the bus. It was, to take a phrase of the great Diana Wynne-Jones, a disembodied voice, just floating over us bus riders as we listened to this swaying, light-headed tune.

I’m not sure when I discovered it was the bus driver singing it over his microphone, but the moment I did, I was utterly charmed. He must have been as bored as we were, poor thing, and decided to past time by serenading his passengers. Luckily for us, he had the perfect voice for those fifty songs, low and rich and French. He also made a bunch of jokes inbetween songs, and gave us a tour of Ottawa, telling us which buildings we were passing and what we could find in them. One of teenage girls next to me gushed to her friends that she just loved the driver. I couldn’t agree with more.

Eventually the traffic cleared and the last few kilometers him he sped though in ten minutes, singing more fifty songs the whole time. He also told people over the microphone that if they needed new transfer because their old ones expire to please come to the front for another one. Nice man! Anyways, I was I the back seat and couldn’t get to the front because there was a huge blockage of people. I didn’t need a transfer – the bus dropped me off at home – but I did want to tell the bus driver how much I enjoyed his singing.

The bus got to my stop, and there was still this huge blockage of people, so I jumped out of the back door and ran up to the front. Luckily, he was still letting people onto the bus. I waved my arms so he could see me, and then yelled, “You have a lovely singing voice!” He looked surprised and then really happy. “Thank-you so much!” he said to me, and I must add heartily, but his tone was very hearty when he said that, and I just as heartily shouted back, "You're welcome!"

And then I went home feeling happy.