Something I forgot, and it sucks.

I think I must have blocked this out when I wrote my previous post because it made me so livid. While taking the bus Saturday night to meet my friends, a guy messed with me and I actually kicked him. Seriously! I will explain.

See, the buses in DC are set up like airplanes: rows of seats with an aisle in between. I was sitting at a window seat reading, since it was still light out. After a few minutes we hit a busy place and the bus filled up, and a guy about my age sat next to me. Right away he pissed me off, because when he sat down he smooshed up right against me, taking up more than his half of the bench. I kind of gave him a sideways look and he said sorry, but he didn't move over at all.

So we were riding along, and I'm still reading, and I notice that he is slowly leaning further and further onto me! What the fuck?! It was creeping me out that this total stranger's arm flesh was pressed up against me. I wedged myself up against the window but he just kept leaning closer and closer. I gave him another nasty look, and he responded with a placid, cud-chewing-cow gaze back at me. FUCKING HELL!

Now I don't know what to do, and I am so stubborn and prideful that I don't want to, like, cede territory to him. I am actually weighing out in my head whether it is better to "give in" by making myself smaller so that he doesn't have the satisfaction of rubbing up against me, or whether I should shove over further towards him so that he has to give up some of the seat. I am pathological with the power thing, I think. I also kept trying to surreptitiously wrench my elbow into his side to force him over, but he is so close that I don't have the leverage for a good jerk.

Then he asks me what I'm reading. I ignore him and roll my eyes so hard I nearly pull a muscle, hoping he will see that his assholishness is not charming me. All it does is make him more persistent, and now he starts reading my book out loud while tracing the words with his finger. That was the last straw. We were almost at my stop, so I jam my book into my purse and say "Excuse me!" to him. He gives me the Cow Gaze of Lust.

I stand up and glower down at him. He looks away from me and just stares straight ahead, while not moving his legs an inch. I cannot believe it. He's not going to let me out?! What the hell is he trying to do - hold me hostage on the bus? I am fuming mad at this point, but also a little scared that maybe I will be held hostage on the bus. Maybe he won't let me off, ever, and I will have to live on the bus, and I will get fired from my job, and I'll never be able to take a shower again, and I'll never see my friends and family, and...

Okay, so all of that is running through my head, along with the blinding white hot fury. After a few seconds, I YELL "Can you let me by, please!" The bus is packed, and everybody turns to look. He mutters "Bitch," and moves his knees about four inches to the side, a final power play, so that I have to rub up against him to get past. In that moment I wonder what the chances are that he'll follow me off the bus, and I decide small. So I kick the ever loving hell out of his legs as I shove past him, through the crowded aisle, and off the bus.

I made it off the bus fine; he didn't follow me or anything. (I don't know what I would have done if he had! I'm small!) But I am so angry about it. I think I may need anger management training or something, because I feel almost perpetually pissed off about the street harassment I experience in DC. The only other large city I've lived in has been London, and it was practically never an issue there. Here in DC? Hardly a day goes by that a man doesn't mutter something nasty at me from a doorway while I pass. There is construction going on all over downtown, and I've heard the phrase "Nice tits" more times than I can count. In my neighborhood there are packs of young guys who just hang out on the corners and call me baby, or they hold entire conversations in Spanish accompanied by some choice hand gestures.

*Okay, now here comes the part where I get really mad.*

Seriously, what the fuck is this? There is almost nothing that angers me more. I resent the hell out of the fact that when I walk I am on display, and people can look at my body and make comments about it, as if that is their right. What are these people thinking? Were they raised in entirely male households? I just cannot imagine that anybody who has had a sister or a girl friend or even a mother, for chrissakes, is still capable of just carving up people's bodies with their eyes this way. It's become a quality of life issue. It sucks to have to walk around with my nose in the air, pretending I didn't hear what some guy just said, because if I make eye contact he'll only get more forward.

And I know I am not the only one having this problem. I don't dress in muu-muus, but then neither do I wear skimpy, flashy clothes. There's nothing really eye-catching about my appearance (except perhaps for my now-red hair) so every other woman must get the same crap. I think we should start up a campaign to make the local politicans aware of this. We can have a special police force that deals in Urban Assholery. I would totally pay more taxes to the DC government for that.

Damn. I have to stop now before I have a stress-induced aneurysm.