There are days when like E.T., you just want to go home. Like our gnarly alien friend, you are unfortunately experiencing transportational difficulties. You’ve been stranded on EDSA Ayala for roughly 49 minutes and three yawns. Everywhere you look, there are more stranded people, presumably waiting for the same bus you’re dying to plant your behind on.
As your standoff with the universe and the god of buses nears the one hour mark, you feel that standing around is not going to do you any good. You are goaded on by the desire to get home, eat dinner, take a shower, and get your well deserved 8 hour shut eye. Suddenly, getting home takes a whole new different sense of urgency and at the same moment, you get a bright idea: Gee, why don’t I just cross EDSA and catch a bus before it makes a U-turn to southbound and before ten million people clog its doors and beat you to a seat?
You almost hop and skip up the stairs leading to the Ayala MRT station, until you reach the massive mass of meat puppets lined up for the train. Like a good solid cockblock to your bright idea, the mass of faceless henchmen are scrunched up so close to each other that you get a sudden irrational fear that somebody may get impregnated just standing there. Before the fear overtakes you, you plunge in and find yourself suddenly neck deep in a moving, breathing, sweating and subsequently stinking mass of bodies.
During this odyssey you find yourself examining all the things you’ve done in your life and what you could have possibly done to deserve being pressed tightly against a big guy whose last shower seems to have been last month and a scrawny lady who indulges in using her overlarge umbrella to stab people in the foot. Twenty feet from the stairs, you realize that there is a queue snaking from the said stairs to you. You first think this is a queue for a lotto stall, but upon closer inspection, no, it’s a queue for the STAIRS. If you want to take the stairs, you would need to line up. Ah, the night has turned into hell with fangs on and armed with knives.
Forty-five minutes later, you’ve made a circuit around the Ayala Avenue to Pasay Road stretch of EDSA exactly twice. You’ve also gone from Denial, Anger, and Bargaining and have finally accepted that you will be spending a night in Ayala. You heed the calls of your grumbling stomach and buy overpriced (squid) balls from a random street vendor. After paying for said overpriced balls, you see a bus. Not just any bus, but YOUR bus. It’s your bus, stopped by a red light at the EDSA-Ayala intersection. In the middle of your run toward it, the light changes to green.
If you hesitate, you risk being run over by a car, or worse a truck and a bus then several other cars. This is one of those circumstances when being slightly athletic pays off. Driven by the desire to get home and slightly energized by 5 overpriced squidballs, you sprint to the bus, cling to its side, and finally leap into it. (Disclaimer: Replicating this stunt is highly discouraged. This is not only dangerous; it is severely batshit insane as well. You do not do these types of stunts unless dying a painful and horrible death is on your To-Do list for the day.)
Finally, a note to the bus driver who may or may not have seen me but slowed down either way: I swear to Batman, when I start driving around, I will try my hardest not to swear at your brand of bus. Or at least, not for the first few weeks.
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