at least i can read

Tuesday night I met up with my friend Mike after I got off work and we headed down to the Village to this cozy little hole-in-the-wall lesbian bar for $2 margaritas. (Go ahead and read that sentence again, because once I move back to the south you won't be seeing much of anything like that on here anymore.) It was a cute little dive, with aquatic-themed mobiles and other various ornamentation hanging from the ceiling, nestled in the middle of an even cuter neighborhood.

We both had to work the next morning, so we made a decently early night of it and left the bar a few minutes before midnight. Knowing that we were relatively close to one of the downtown PATH stations (the train that hauls me back to Jersey) I decided to make my way there instead of taking the subway uptown to catch the train at 33rd, which I've been known to do.

That decision was really dumb.

I think when you get to be grown, it's okay to just admit there is some shit you're not so good at. When you're a kid, your teachers and parents don't want you to say, "I can't do this" or "I can't do that," because it's so limiting. Maybe you can, and you just haven't tried. Or maybe you can and you just haven't learned.

But I've tried. And I've learned. (Or at least been taught repeatedly.) And I am here to tell you, I CANNOT READ MAPS. The display of ineptitude that took place in the Christopher Street subway station in the wee hours of Wednesday morning was nothing less than disturbing. I looked at that map, ooooh boy, did I look at that map. Studied is really the more appropriate word. But when I walked up to the street level I felt like I'd shown up for a quiz having accidentally reviewed the wrong chapter. Nothing looked familiar, not even vaguely, not remotely, not on some distant far-off planet where I can read maps and do algebra equations in my head.

So I went back down into the subway and started studying again. I looked for the names of the streets I'd seen at the top of the stairs, tried to locate myself and determined the best course of action. If I walked down this one street, I determined, I would run right into Christopher Street and therefore, the PATH station. Too easy! Right?

Wroooooong. About 20 minutes later I arrived at another subway station, and I will say this -- that time when I studied the map I was able to discern that I'd gone long about three-fourths of a mile in the absolute opposite direction of where I'd needed to go. At this point it was nearing one in the morning, and I was exhausted. I got on that train and rode it all the way uptown, getting off at 23rd Street to walk over to the 23rd PATH station about a block away.

I finally got home around 2:15 a.m., just barely making it to the bathroom since I'd had to pee pretty much the entire time I'd been traipsing around lower Manhattan. And as I sat there, audibly sighing with relief, I thought about my parents, who for years during my childhood would map out routes for our family vacations using a U.S. atlas. How I was born so shockingly devoid of this skill, I'll never know. All I can say is, thank Allah for Google Maps.

cheers,
elizabeth