Today I decided, pre-departure, to do my laundry. Which, as an impulse, has its girl-like sides to it. I wasn't out of clean clothes, and I hadn't worn most of those shirts more than once.

Anyway, I found myself a laundromat. Attached to a bar, right across from the statue of Chief Seattle. I put my stuff in, and went outside to smoke and try to do that day's Sudoku. These two guys were talking in front of me. They looked like they had done some hard living in their time. They were trading stories of guns that got pulled on them, petty theft, etc. One guy said, "Chicago is a bad town to be a junky." He said that in Seattle you could panhandle but in Chicago you'd be a second story guy, "you'd be a criminal."

I went back inside and put my clothes in the drier. This guy in a wheelchair rolled over. He was an old guy, the kind of old guy who looks like he reads a lot of William Gibson. His glasses were held together by a rubber band and he had a very large beard. He said he was bored, and asked me to propose a subject. I asked him where he was from.

He took a look at the funny pages, taking my Sudoku away from me. I thought about saying, it's one thing to distract me from my puzzle, but another to take the paper away from me.

He asked me what I did. I said, as I mostly do in situations where I don't really know how much I want to talk to someone, that I was a lawyer. Which is true -- I'm a member of the State Bar of California -- but also tends to buy you a little more space. He took his clothes out of the washer, and asked for my help folding a sheet. I asked him if he didn't want to dry it first. He said, "Oh, yes," and that he didn't do the laundry that often. He mumbled about being a single guy. He had already asked me if I was married.

Let me make something clear: I had no doubt about my ability (or my eventual decision) to get out of this conversation, and he wasn't hitting on me, really. It just made me think about being female.

Because there is this series of ingrained impulses to keep yourself out of ambiguous situations. They're probably not dangerous, but there's always the possibility, and why play the odds? It's true for everybody, of course, but I think more true for girls -- the risks are (seem?) greater, and therefore it's more dramatic to take them and more shameful if you do take them and something fucked up happens. A girl who goes to a strange guy's house is acting more recklessly, is demonstrating a greater disregard for social convention, than a guy who does the same thing. It strikes me.

That's a bad thing; it shouldn't be that way. And one of the reasons it's a bad thing is that it makes it harder to tell the difference between situations you don't want to enter because they're dangerous and situations you don't want to enter because they're boring as all hell.

If a situation sets those vague, subliminal danger signals off flashing in your head, it's harder to see that it's boring. It creates a difficulty in discrimination which is bad.

The guy who had said it was hard to be a junky in Chicago came back in and he and the guy in a wheelchair started a desulatory conversation about Tom Robbins and Charles Bukowski.

I finished my laundry and left.