Fun Fact: I Was Born Without a Brain

At 9:15 this morning I sent my friend and fellow intern Hilary the following text: "Fun fact: I was born without a brain."

This is, as those who know me will agree, mostly true. While attempting to make peppermint hot chocolate the other night, I melted a piece of candy cane to the bottom of the pan and started to freak out that I would never get it unstuck. ("It's sugar, Olivia," my mom had to remind me. "It melts.") I once spelled "bath" "baht" during a game of Scrabble and didn't realize it until my friend pointed it out as we were putting the board away. In college, I announced to my friends (completely seriously) that I was "skilled and seasoned...like a piece of meat." 

Clearly I don't have a whole lot going on upstairs.

But however idiotically I've acted in the past, arguably nothing I've done up to this point has been as stupid as what I did this morning. 

Last night it snowed around four inches in the span of a couple hours. The temperature was right at 32, and by the time I was getting into bed the snow had turned to rain. Huge white drifts were beginning to plummet from tree branches that sprang back up in weightlessness. When I awoke in the morning there were still a couple inches on the ground, but the overnight rain had turned it entirely to slush. 

I don't own snow boots and I refuse to wear my rain boots to work. I'm convinced that such footwear would be inappropriate because I have to appear somewhat professional, and black boots with multicolored polka dots doesn't exactly scream "Take me seriously!" (Why I seem to think navy blue Keds are acceptable is beyond me.) So I wore my tennies to the bus stop with my pant legs rolled up like the true gangsta I am, and by the time I reached the freeway entrance my shoes and thick wool socks were entirely soaked. There was deep, dirty slush all around me. I was trapped in deep, dirty slush.

My bus, the 522 (to Seattle), usually comes at about 8:24. Though there are two other buses that service that stop, neither of them comes anywhere near the same time as mine. Imagine my surprise, then, when at 8:22 I saw a small Metro bus--the 236 to Kirkland--approaching at a notable clip, brown slush spewing out in all directions. I frowned. The 236 was not listed as stopping here. As it came closer, I saw that the the driver was motioning to me, pointing down at his steering wheel somewhat menacingly as if to say, "This is the bus you want! You will ride this bus if it's the last thing you do."

Did I for one second stop to remember that this was, in fact, not the bus I wanted? Absolutely not. I knowingly boarded the wrong vehicle. Like I said, I was born without a brain.

Because of the snow, I figured some of the buses might be on snow routes. Maybe this driver was simply covering the 522's usual passengers. I kept telling myself this despite the fact that the destination on the front of the bus clearly said "KIRKLAND." I maintained this mindset for a large portion of the ride, including a long strip of road that I thought could have been a back street through Lake City. It was, of course, not.

I rode all the way to the terminal--a random stop in some random part of Kirkland with which I was utterly unfamiliar. By this time my feet were searingly cold and the thought crossed my mind that if I ever made it out of this ordeal alive, I was going to become a monk so I could learn to spiritually transcend the icy, stabbing pain of frostbite. 

The bus route board at this stop listed that the 255 to downtown Seattle was scheduled to arrive at 9:09am. I checked my watch. 8:57. Perfect timing, I thought. I might even make it to work on time! I get in to the office at 9:30 every morning, and while onboard the 236 I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably be roaming around the greater Seattle area, lost, for the rest of my life. 9:09 was, from this, a vast improvement.

Here is where my bus-snow logic would have come in handy. Naturally it didn't occur to me that this bus might be on a snow route. Was it? You betcha. (This is, after all, my life.) In this case, the snow route meant that the bus was coming every hour instead of every half hour. And, as luck would have it, I had just missed it. I didn't know this, though, until it rolled up an hour later--after I had seen the other four buses come through once, and then twice, and I overheard my driver telling the woman behind me why he hadn't come 30 minutes before.

The 255 was extremely crowded but I managed to snag an aisle-facing seat in the middle rotating section--the part that looks like the inside of an accordion (because evidently I know what the inside of an accordion looks like). The problem with this was that since I was on a bus whose route was completely foreign to me, and because there were so many people blocking the windows, and because the few inches of window I could see were entirely fogged up, I had no idea where I was. "Are you somewhere in Enumclaw?" Hilary asked when she called several minutes later. Though I was fairly certain I was heading toward Seattle, Enumclaw was as good a guess as any.

For the sake of your sanity, I'll fast forward through the rest of the ride, including when I overheard a lady tell an elderly man that the next stop was University and, believing her, I got off there only to discover it was 5th and Pine and I had to slog seven blocks through Hurricane Wednesday Morning to get to the office. I'll also fast forward through my email not working.

I arrived at my desk and Clancey looked up from her computer. "Good bus ride?" she asked, smirking. "I may or may not have taken the wrong one," I answered. "I find it alarming that I'm almost 23 and I still have no idea how to ride public transportation." "You know," she said, "a month from now this is going to be hilarious. Heck, it's hilarious now."

You know me. I live to amuse.