the ratio of cows to people

living in a big city like dc gives you all kinds of opportunities to observe human behavior. riding the metro every day is pretty much the equivilant of receiving a master’s degree in psychology from some big fancy school, as far as i am concerned. this makes me totally qualified to make statements up and try and pass them off as being true, since i graduated from the u of wmata, which would be the university of the washington metro transit authority to those of you who don’t speak dc-bonics. so it has come to my attention that i think that humans may indeed be more closely related to cows than primates, and i make this statement because you can practically hear the moo-ing when a crowd of metro-riders begin moving forward to squeeze their collective selves through one narrow door like there is a cattle prod being dangled in front of their dull, glassy eyes. seriously, this boggles my mind. think about it. if you are on the metro, at an airport, even in line at the store, wherever the big crowd of people is, that is where people will gravitate towards. so what if there is no line to go up the escalator on the other side of the platform? i want to stand in line with the rest of the herd and go up THIS ONE. no line for baggage check just a few desks down? forget it. i wanna be where everyone else is. god forbid we ever talk to anyone in that line to make sure this is, indeed, where we should be, we just see a line and assume we should be in it, so off we go. just yesterday i was standing on the curb in a busy intersection waiting for the light to change, and the guy next to me starts to cross, so naturally, i start to cross, too. only i had to jump back up on the curb to avoid being hit by a bus, so it’s not always a wise idea to follow the heard. but i noticed when i was leaping back to safety that i was not the only one who had followed this fool’s lead. remember when your mom used to say, “if so and so jumped off of a bridge, would you do it too?” apparently, the answer to that question is YES.