I am on the MetroNorth train into Manhattan Sunday night. When I got onto the train, there weren’t many seats, and this guy was taking up four seats–sitting in between two, across from two where his computer and cell phone were taking up space. I looked intensely at the seat where his cell phone was, indicating in proper New Yorker that I intended to take the seat over from his Blackberry. He moved his Blackberry, then started packing up his computer. He pulled out a bag of nuts (something with a shell, but I couldn’t tell what kind it was). He began eating the nuts and throwing the shells on the floor…! Now, I have seen lots of crazy things. And really, this is quite the least of them. So I must have given him a look, because he offered me some nuts. I declined. But he kept throwing the shells on the ground. Here is what they look like:

This is something that continues to amaze me–people just throwing things around, not respecting the space they live in. Perhaps they feel like it isn’t really their space, like they will never personally have to sit in that seat again, so it doesn’t matter what they do to it. That it should be someone else’s job to clean up after them because they’ve paid for the ride. I don’t know. But it seems really disrespectful to me. But then he offered me, a complete stranger, some of what he was eating, which just makes it all so much stranger. I think it was a nice gesture. Just such a contradiction to his throwing the shells on the ground though. WTF?