Point J: Hartford

Start travel time: 5:04 AM
End travel time: 5:52 PM
Modes of transportation: foot, train, bus, unicycle
Number of hours added to my trip by rush hour traffic: 2

Oh right, I went to New York for a reason other than hanging out with my cool friends doing cool things in a cool city. I have to go to Hartford for an interview.

Going to an interview sleep-deprived is really never a stellar idea (did you guys read the story that says that going to work tired is like going to work drunk? What happens if you go to work tired AND drunk? Does an interview count as work? Because it FEELS like work and it's IN a workplace. Maybe I shouldn't be drunk) but I was really excited to go to my friend's work party and eat meatballs and play skeeball all night. However, this was sandwiched between not sleeping much the night before and having to wake up at 4 AM to look presentable before leaving at 5 AM to take the train to Port Authority so I could be on time for my bus to leave for Hartford at 6 AM.

But I need a job so it's time to double up on pastries and just DEAL WITH IT.

Cue sleeping on the bus for two-and-a-half hours.

I don't remember how I got here but I'm pretty sure this is Connecticut

People in Hartford were so friendly it was alarming. Every person who I passed on the street had a genuine interest in how my day was going. The woman who told me that her store was running a special deal where you get $150 off if you spend $500 (ON WHAT? WHAT COULD I POSSIBLY WANT HERE THAT COSTS---oh, that skirt is $735? Oh. I get it.), instead of pulling a Pretty Woman on me, she shook my hand, introduced herself to me, wasn't a d-bag about my line of work, and was just wayyyy nice. So was everybody in the city. Did the organization I interviewed with pay people to be friendly to trick me into staying? Was this a bait-and-switch in which I would accept the job and then everyone would be all like "Psych! Now we're going to pour paint in your hair and put spiders in your tea"? Were they all high? I don't know. But it creeped me out so I switched my bus ticket so I could run back to New York where people would yell at me again and everything would be normal.

I mean, I could have stayed a little longer to try to break into the old Colt factory or gotten a bunch of insurance quotes from literally anyone in the city. Maybe I should have gotten the insurance quotes before breaking into the gun factory.

Big mistake. Big. Huge.

Thanks to rush hour (the traffic, not the multi-million dollar Jackie Chan franchise), I got to add two additional hours to my trip back to New York, over one hour of which was spent crawling in Manhattan and 4.5 hours of which were spent with me being hungry and sleep-deprived. Readers who know me well know that I turn into a monster when:
a. I am hungry
b. I am stuck in traffic and trying to get somewhere
c. Republicans do things like passing rape insurance bills in Michigan
Unfortunately for everyone within stomping distance, we were in for a hat trick.

When I boarded the bus at 1:30 after having consumed only a cheese-and-raspberry croissant and a pumpernickel bagel all day (yum, amirite?), I thought, "NBD. Food can happen at 4 PM after a nice nap and I'm going to get back to New York early enough to try to get a cronut and then I'm going to hang out with my friends and things are going to be great." But the guy sitting behind me on the bus smelled funky and kept getting calls from his friends and I kept getting calls about jobs and the level of hunger was building to crescendo of panicked cries from my blood-sugar depleted brain.

As we inched past Central Park and down 5th Avenue and my phone kept blowing up because my friends aren't psychic and didn't know that I couldn't hear because steam was coming out of my ears, the tension rose to an unsustainable level and the homunculi that operate the switch boards in my brain decided it was time to Hulk out and I ripped my clothes off, tore the bolted-down seats out of the floor and threw them through the window to release the trapped passengers and ran growling through the streets in search of sustenance. I saw a sign for New York-style pizza and pointed and grunted that I wanted the piece of pizza that had four whole chickens and an ocean of buffalo sauce on it and nearly knocked over the pregnant woman who was standing in between me and paying (I'M SORRY, BABY, YOU CAN EAT THE PLACENTA. I NEED FUD NOW!) and breathed in the slice of pizza in 7.3 seconds and daintily wiped the corners of my mouth with a napkin and I was a person again.

Then I had a totally great evening hanging out with all my New York friends and my friend Lauren came up from Jersey AGAIN to see me and rescue me when I lost my metro pass right before returning to the airport.

Oh wait, we're at the end of the post and nobody knows anything about Hartford because I left after spending 4 hours there. Breakdown of my trip to Hartford:
Hour #1: Try to look not puffy and wrinkly and find worksite
Hour #2: Try to sound not like an idiot when answering where I see myself in five years
Hour #3: Try to get a sense of what the city feels like
Hour #4: Try to change my bus ticket to leave sooner because this city is too clean and quiet and friendly

A poem? Will that suffice?

Hartford,where I left my ford of hearts so long ago this day
On thy snow-covered greens in Bushnell Park where I lay
Staring at the arch erected to remember sailors and soldiers
Battling blood-thirsty enemies bolstered by gallons of Folgers 
I watch as insurance companies flee the city walls
Claiming that paying their fair share of taxes is balls
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Samuel Clemens turn in their graves
To witness how the corporate person behaves
In a city that rivals only Brownville, Texas in poverty
We are finding that trickle-down doesn't work so properly
Hartford, what has become of one of the wealthiest cities in the nation?
Was it the loss of the Hartford Whalers that caused this degradation?
But Hartford shall return one day to its former state of glory
Or end up saying "You don't know me" on Maury.