italy 2: PHiL's surefire route to the hidden paradise of Bus Bewilderment and titles that are too long, exacerbated by auto-reflection p.s. if anybody knows how to control the font/style options in BLOGGER please tell me because right now it is the proverbial accelerating foot in my genitalia

1. Choose your Rome environs in such a way as to depend uniquely upon that marvelous provoker of perspiration, the 105 bus. Bonus: ignore the people you live with when they tell you that you're better off paying 10times the busfare to take a cab... or buying the farm.

2. Take the bus. Take it every day. Twice.

3. Enter the bus, which is always waiting for you with the seats fully occupied, and find a place to stand. The wise man stands near a window, so he can dream of one day jumping out of it. Stand wooden, watching in stone-faced horror as the engine starts, signaling 50 more people to frantically trample onto the bus. Flex available muscles to maximize claim to internal volume.... but don't flex too hard - you don't want to be accused of internal volume gouging. All around you the mob churns.

4. Heat. Feel. Pray that you are granted clemency from your fiery tortures - example 5 of clemency, devised way home on 20 June: you are turned into a whale that has washed onto a beach in Mexico where there are no environmentalists to pour water on you and thereby pronlong your agonizing death.

5. Try to count the number of fellow bus occupants that have entered the daily contest to see who can talk the loudest on their cellphone.

6. Crowdsurf off the bus, sparing a passing thought for the 958 people that are still on the bus. You do this because it puzzles you, who gets off at the second-to-the-last-stop, that everybody stays on to the last stop. You feel like you are missing something, but are leery of the stop's translation into "Caves with Bones."

7. Relate your tale on a blog, but be sure to attenuate its raw barbarity.