I rely of course on my sense of sight (and to a lesser yet still vital degree, smell) when navigating the cars of the New York City subway system, but I didn’t realize to what degree I relied on hearing until today.
My new headphones arrived from J&R, Panasonic RP-HTX7PP-C retro-style monitor headphones (cream-colored for extra retro-ness), kind of like the ones we kids of the ’80s wore back then to listen to educational filmstrips or language lab. They’re snug and sound-blocking, though not technically noise-cancelling.
Anyway, at the 168th Street stop of the A train, a woman rose to exit before the train had fully stopped, so I moved quickly to take her seat, didn’t hear the train’s lurching brake into the station, lost my balance and flopped gently into the lap of a random young lady in a red wool coat, who coincidentally also had on earmuff-style headphones.
When I talk while wearing these headphones, it sounds to me as if I’m under water, so I indicated via facial expression and hand gestures that I was extremely apologetic and wasn’t trying to cop a feel or anything. If it helps you to imagine the scene—and it certainly does for me—the song playing on my iPod when this all went down was Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever.”