magic bus

Riding the bus takes up a lot of my time and it's fixin to take up a lot more because they just cancelled my community transit route due to budget cuts. How rude! Why does everything have to revolve around the budget? That's my philosophy. Anyway I get to take a different bus now and it adds a full hour onto my commute each way but I actually don't mind and I kind of like it, I get to listen to music and read and on this bus I always get a window seat. I LOVE the window seat. I've had two bus adventures in the two days I've ridden my new route, on Monday I was waiting for my first bus and this girl was at the bus stop with me saying she was freezing and she'd been up all night at a party and she had to call her parole officer and get downtown to meet him or else she'd be in big trouble. I let her call him on my phone and she told me she's 17 and just got out of meth rehab and her mom hates her boyfriend so her mom doesn't talk to her anymore, but she lives with him in Olympia and he's 25. I blurted out "Don't get pregnant. Take your birth control every day, okay? Your life is hard enough" and she said "Oh I have one kid but he's in Mexico. He's three." AHHH! That poor girl, and that poor boy. We got on the bus and she told me she had her GED and she wanted to go to college. I told her she could totally do it and she can have a good life. She said her boyfriend tells her she can't go to school and I was all "don't listen to him, he is lying to you. You can absolutely do it. You can do whatever you want. You can make your life really great." I was starting to feel cheesy but she was seeming to perk up. I wanted to tell her to read Judge Judy's book "Beauty Fades But Dumb is Forever" but managed not to, I just love that book though. So we got off the bus and I gave her a hug and told her she can do it and all that. Then today she wasn't on the bus but another guy was and he said to me "can I ask what you do?" and he said he was wondering because he heard my conversation with that girl the other day and he said he's a teacher and was glad I talked to her and he said "I could tell you and she didn't run in the same social circles" and I was glad for that. We talked the whole bus ride and he eventually asked "are you a Christian?" and I said yes and he said "that's the missing piece. It all makes sense now." That was interesting. He said he teaches at a Christian school and that he's especially sensitive to troubled kids because they all look so good on the outside but he can tell when they're doing poorly in school that something is going on at home. We talked about all that, the tendency of Christian families to want to look perfect and not be transparent. Then I had to get off the bus. My new route is turning out to be rather chatty.