2004-07-03

Last night I saw the most amazing thing. A woman got on the bus with a child in a stroller. She then extracted the child from the stroller, collapsed the stroller, and stashed it out of the way in the little baggage area, then went and sat down with her child. This is incredible! I have a real hate-on for strollers on public transit: usually they end up parked in the prime real estate at the front of the bus, right in the centre of the aisle, forcing you to use a set of grappling hooks and a team of Sherpas to navigate your way to an available seat. And strollers really are monstrosities these days. They�ve come a long way since the days when they were basically hammocks on wheels. Now every unit is a full-sized canvas SUV, complete with retractable sun roof, four-wheel drive, global positioning system (slightly extraneous since you could probably see the fucking thing from space) and an entertainment console featuring an interactive multimedia presentation of �Twinkle Twinkle Little Star�; not to mention the storage capacity to carry enough gear to survive in the wilderness for a month. This is silly. And the mothers who purchase these gargantuan baby conveyance devices are the same mothers who drop forty dollars on teeny-tiny pairs of Tommy Hilfiger socks. Any financial investment of this sort is inherently illogical: babies have the growth rate of terminal cancer and all the discriminating fashion savvy of Richard Simmons. They do not care, and even if they did, they grow too fast to notice. You could dress a baby in a paper bag and carry it around in a rucksack and it would be none the worse for it; this would also render said baby vastly easier to stow in overhead compartments and under seats, making it MUCH EASIER for me to board buses and planes. It�s a win-win situation, is it not?