Pregnant and Brazen

El train phenomena is the subject of endless conversation. You get all kinds of crazies on the El train: First timers who don't think they need to hold on and are quickly jostled into reality, people who never learned to use their "inside" voices to have extremely intimate and/or graphic conversations on their cell phones-I feel like I could testify at a child custody hearing with the amount of garbage I've overheard. And then there are the people who push through the crowd to get to the doors when the train is still many minutes from their stop. These are classic El train amateurs- it's like they really think they'll be stuck on the train if they aren't right at the door when the train pulls into the station.

But my favorite quirk about the El is the Sardine Effect. Everyone likes to congregate towards the doors, especially at rush hour, and the result are sparsely populated middle and end sections of the train. So when the doors open, all of the people smooshed together look like a can of sardines between the doorway. That's all well and good unless you're me, and you're trying to get on the train when it's 30 degrees and windy and the Sardine Effect is already in full swing. So last night, for the first times in a long time, I pulled out the loud mouthy city persona and instructed the sardines to disperse so me and my fellow train stop friends could get on board. Not only was their room for all of us, but there was plenty of it.