I'm From Here! I'm From New York!

By the time the bus company put me on hold to find out if the bus I was waiting for was, indeed, running on time, I spotted the bus. I hung up, threw my phone into my bag, got my bus ticket out of my jacket pocket, and watched the bus rumble past me. The driver finally stopped when he noticed me running after the bus and flailing my arms (a bit like a lunatic, but only a bit). When I got on, I was informed that I have to flag down the driver if I want him to stop.
"But I was waiting at a stop."
"That's a stop. This is a stop. Anywhere's a stop! You have to flag the driver so that he knows to stop."
"But I was at the REAL stop!" I said. "The stop for the Park and Ride!"
"You have to flag the driver. A lot of buses to the city pass here; I don't know who's waiting for which bus."
I apologized and sat myself next to a girl in the front seat.
"Just flag the driver." I was told. Again.
"I'm not usually the only one at the bus stop, but now I'll remember your advice."
I'm not sure if he was done enlightening me on the virtues of Flagging The Driver, but I was done with listening. The fact that the Jewish driver of a Jewish-run bus company passed by my Jewish little tush which was waiting, by the way, at THE REAL bus stop without realizing that I was so obviously waiting for his bus sincerly confused me. While I am pretty prone to self-realizations while riding the bus, the implications of what had just occured were not something I wanted to so readily accept. Could it be that my Italian/Israeli-like looks were not Jewish-like enough for the driver to have figured out that I am Jewish, or was it more likely the way I was dressed?
I got off the bus, took care of a few things in midtown, and then hailed a cab to take me to school. I was barely done debating whether or not to listen to my iPod when the driver started a conversation.
"Are you from Kentucky?"
"What? No."
"Missouri?"
"NO! I'm from here. I'm from New York."
And again, my integrity was being called into question. This time, though, I had no time for self-reflection because my driver was not going to let go of his audience. I heard about:
how terrible America is because people are poor
how awful this country's become because the President doesn't know what pi is
how stupid we've become because when he takes 11th graders, they don't know what the square root of 141 is
how lazy we've become because we have the internet and sent manufacturing jobs over seas
and how behind other countries we are because in Scandinavia they wear uniforms to school.
My driver, mind you, was from Hungary. He came to America in '75 ("About five years before you were born. What year were you born? '83? '84?") and thinks that it's been slowly going to pot since about the mid-eighties.
The moral of my story is that one should always flag down bus drivers and have their earphones on before stepping into cabs.