caught by the NEL service disruption yesterday: at 1550 or so i was already at little india and would have been right on time for a 1600 vivocity meeting but when we finally evacuated the station it was ten past four and not only was race course road a terrible place to try and get a cab, it was the shift-changing hour and you had to match destinations. what with several hundred commuters surging above ground at the same time all trying to call cabs i thought my best bet was to walk into the city — i had to get to vivocity somehow to see the grand budapest hotel (lush visuals, witty romp, but somewhat slighter than his others) with andrew (i had our tickets for a 1750 screening) and i did so, in heels and a high-neck dress (it was nearly 2km, but i knew that if i could get into the city at all i had a good chance of joining a taxi queue at a mall.) this i managed to do at handy road (i could have wished, having got to handy road, that we could watch it at the cathay!) as it happens, i slid into my seat just as the title card for chapter one came up: i’d missed merely the frame tale.

(what, i thought, though, of all the people who wouldn’t be able to get where they wanted to by cab — the people with low income, the old and technologically unsavvy, the student. most people were annoyed but could ask for afterall, many people are on the train because their income does not permit them to splurge, or indeed spend, on cabs, and if public transit fails them what are they to do? i would have gladly given anyone a lift with me, if they were going my way, but i could not get a cab myself. and then too, these general well-meaning impulses never come to anything — how could you in a crowd identify who needed a ride and was going your way, to ask them to join you?)