THE OTHER DAY on the way home, I found myself across from this guy on the Red line. The train was relatively empty. He was sitting in the middle of three seats between two of the metal poles that people hold on to; the ones on either side of him were unoccupied, except for the neat olive/khaki messenger bag on the seat to his right. He had one leg crossed perpendicularly over the other, like the Hanged Man if he was sitting down. He was wearing a yarmulke.

Resting on his crossed leg was a three-ring binder, one with translucent white covers and a cornflower blue spine, and loops that are lazy arcs rather than full circles. The pages in the binder had color-coded rectangles printed down the side, and corresponding rainbow tabs jutting out from the dividers. He was making notes with a fancy, brushed-metal mechanical pencil, and in his other hand he was holding a Xerox of an article or something, titled "Archaeologische Mitteilungen aus Iran," and a round metal tin that looked like it could have held breath mints, or I don't know what -- I couldn't see the label.

He seemed pretty unconcerned with whatever was going on around him. He was just riding the train, reading his stuff. I don't know why I found him so fascinating. I think it might have been binder envy. That was one cool binder he had.

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS about riding public transportation is that the announcements that the conductors make are almost always incomprehensible unless you already know what they're going to say. In a way it's sort of like traffic reports on the radio, where they rattle off a bunch of road names (or more likely, numbers and exits), sprinkled with a bunch of bizarre landmark references like "the water tower" or "the cloverleaf" in this undistinguished stream that is nearly impossible to parse unless you've experienced the exact situation that's being described, which of course is the whole point.

So the other night I'm on the Red line again, and the conductor announces, as we pull into a station, that we're on a "Braintree train." (Typing Braintree always reminds me of this book I once worked on, whose author recounted the first time he arrived in Boston to go to college and passed through Braintree. He thought it was a very odd name for a town. It had never occurred to me before then. Brain. Tree. It is a little odd.)

Anyway, I say he announced what train it was because, as I mentioned before, I already knew what he meant to say, but what he really said was something like, "Brane tretrain, this is a brane tretrain."

"Crazy train?" someone in the car said to his companion. "Love train? What?"

"Braintree train," his friend explained patiently. "Brain-tree."

"Love train ..." the first guy started to sing, to the tune of nothing I recognized. "Love train ..."

It was my stop we were pulling in to, so I never got to find out how the song went.

A WHILE AGO, some girls from a local high school came by selling cookie dough for something or other.

D answered the door (which is something he hates to do). Through the door, I could vaguely hear the girls making their pitch.

"Cookie dough? How about cookies? I would buy them if you made the cookies for me."

The girls seemed to confer with each other for a moment. "Can we do that?" "Um, I don't think we're allowed to do that."

D turned around and asked, "Kellnerin, if I buy cookie dough, will you make cookies?"

"Okay," I said.

So he bought some. It was a girl-scout-cookie-type deal (except for the fact, as we'd established, that they weren't yet cookies), where you pay first and dough arrives at a later date.

Earlier today I was at the supermarket, and having recently read iGrrrl's diary about apple pie (yes, I've been horribly behind the times), I was thinking about baking. I used to bake a fair amount, but lately I seem to cook more and bake less. November always seems like a good month for pies, though, or at least some kind of apple crumble or apple crisp (which a former roommate of my sister's once dubbed "apple critter"). It's silly, I know, since there really isn't such a thing as a bad month for pies, but my thoughts always seem to stray pie-ward this time of year.

So I was wandering in the supermarket, failing to find Honey Crisp apples, and wondering if I really had the motivation to bake today, when it occurred to me, "Hey, D ordered some cookie dough a while ago and it never came." I sort of lost my baking resolve and ended up bringing home the usual groceries instead.

Later in the afternoon, the doorbell rang. D answered it again. "Is this cookie dough?" I heard him say. "I thought you had scammed me and I was never going to get it."

"Yeah, sorry. It came a little late."

So, I baked, inasmuch as throwing dough into the oven can be called baking. The cookies turned out not too bad at all. Mmmm, sugar.