OMG

The faces on the train can be so trying.

The advertisements you encounter before the morning rush are awful; from the crass and tasteless posters for horror films, the dregs of the underground product shilling, to the unsettling and truly very stupid ad for “Rescue Me”, the latter apparently some compellingly idiotic show about Dennis Leary’s distended neck. The atmosphere takes a slight turn to the more upbeat and jaunty as you exit the train: Hey! iPod ads! Colorful! All of the substance of a reggaeton song from a Newark summer of ’05! Drawing back into the trains, the most recent droll and insipid poster features a desperate woman, face oily and mascara running (undoubtedly the result of emotional feelings pertaining to the state of the MBTA), partially obscured by a chain link pattern. Captivity®! What the poster doesn’t show is that, if you panned the focus back a few feet, you’d notice the fact that the chain link pattern was a fence, not a wall of a cage, a seven foot tall fence at that, and the top wasn’t even that imposing, actually having those little twisty things that any eight year old can bypass without a scratch. Like the ones they have around elementary schools. And also relevant would be the fact that, like those school fences, there was a gaping gap about 15 feet down the fence. Captive, indeed.

Everyday the train rocks back and forth like the denizens of Central Square, caroming through the tunnel at a helter skelter pace, barreling around some corners only to stop for no apparent reason midway through the two relevant stations. The capriciousness of the train and its operator make each day a feast for the senses, and a fantastic workout for your core. For the bargain price of a $2.00 ticket ($1.75 for MBTA card holders, the gentry of underground transit) you can rock back and forth for as long as you can bear, shifting your weight in time with the lurching car. Crunches be damned: the green line is the low impact mama of the future. Focus your weary eyes on the gallery of advertisements as you sculpt your body. Learn Swahili. Teach English in China. Get that medical experiment easy money.

Teach English abroad. Sounds like fun. Screw you, mom and pop, and crusty high school counselor. College was a waste of time. I spent my childhood learning real employable skills. Mastery of English, bitches. Mastered it. Making loot and visiting foreign lands to teach them the native tongue. Figure the other skills I’ve picked up and honed over the years must be valuable as well. Figure I can cut them a deal for my expertise, you know, ‘cause I’m already acting as a consultant. Speculation skills, about all sorts of things, are a specialty of mine. Doesn’t matter how little I’m familiar with it. There’s that one. I can come up with opinions on the spot, at the drop of a hat, new and novel each time if necessary. I’m willing to peddle that shill at a reduced, package rate. I’m pretty well versed in websites, the internet. That fabulous beast. I can show the peeps of the world how to surf the web for hours. (Surf the web. Threw in a little lingo there. Free sample, to show them I’m legit.) Passive research. The World Is Flat. Pick up a copy of that tome on Amazon.com. In Mandarin. Cause I don’t have the time to be reading it to the client and, truthfully, English is a hard monkey to tango with. Your not going to pick up every little nuance if your not a native speaker.

My general cultural knowledge. Expansive. A vast pool of resources I’m willing to make available to the inquisitive soul who has a thirst for knowledge. I’ve got knowledge of comics, video games, and popular music from 1994 to 2005, inclusive, with the exception of Spring 2004, when I was studying other cultures abroad in New Zealand. I’ve read lots of abstracts on Lexis-Nexus, and I’ve got Swank’s password to the premium section of the New York Times website, so I’ve got that going for me (and for the client).

Teaching English to a non English speaker. Could there possibly be a more ridiculous job? And why, of all places, would any right minded English speaker place those ads in the Boston arear? The last thing the World needs, besides transplanted ‘2004 World Champs’ Red Sox caps spread liberally across the globe, is a legion of Japanese people students and business men speaking with a Southie accent. The Southie Pacific accent. Ha! Give us a break.

A word we shouldn’t teach the clients? Appetizer. Ban that word. Stricken it from the English language. Because it’s a paradox. An appetizer cannot feature over 2000 calories. That, in common parlance, is called a meal, in American English, also known as a days worth of sustenance in the FDA’s words. That is an appetite. Someone pulled a fast one on us, dropped the –e for an –izer. Appetizers should be like tapas. You want an appetizer? Go for a run. Refrain from food consumption for six hours or longer, give or take one purging. Your body will create a natural appetizer. It’s called ‘hunger’.

T.G.I.F. Fridays cannot sell appetizers any more, because it’s a contradiction in terms. Food has to be palatable, appetite inducing, for you to consider it an appetizer in these times, and we all know the food at the Teeg is none of the sort. Appetizer. It’s kind of misleading. Let’s just call it ‘meal’ and be done with it. (T.G.I.F.; This, guaranteed, is foul (parenthetic expression; another grammar tip, gratis). And I really don’t recommend teaching people abroad about appetizers. The irony of teaching a Chinese person about the delight of ‘Potstickers’ or ‘Lettuce Wraps’, when their grandparents lived through the Cultural Revolution, might be a lost and pointless cause.

Getting paid for talking English. That’s like your Grandparents giving you money for getting A’s in elementary school. No work. Easy. Who needs a job? You really did learn all you needed to know in life in kindergarten. English. I learned that shit by the time I was six. Teaching English is one rung up the ladder from giving your consent for paid medical studies and selling your sperm. I can’t help but wonder if the English teaching thing is really one big experiment also, subsidized by the Federal Government and T.G.I.F. Fridays to provide wages to otherwise unemployable liberal arts majors and spread to the developing world the gospel of appetizers and appletinis. Or maybe the is government is paying the Chinese Communist Party fees to displace Bostonians in a foreign land to see the long term effects of being removed from the center of the Universe for an extended period of time. Or to see if they would develop a Napoleonic Complex for a Sino-version of New York. In any case, there are even odds that someone would end up stabbed when a compliment of teaching prowess in broken, Southie inflected English is tragically and unintentionally interpreted to imply ‘better than you’ status.