Another Post About Being Female

So I was rude to a guy last night, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about it.

There were a few of us that didn't get seats on the 6:00 bus. When I went back to the bus station, the guy who had been in front of me in line came over and sat down next to me. Not quite next to, because I had my bag up on the next seat. Anyway, we did some head shaking about the whole thing. His English wasn't great, but we expressed our hopes that we would get onto the midnight bus and so forth.

Then he reeled off a kind of ominous stream of questions: how old are you, are you married, do you have a boyfriend? I got a lot quieter, kept peering at my puzzle. He asked for my name, and then was using it in every other sentence. He did a little bit of leaning over. He asked me if I liked to dance. He said, "You don't smoke anything, do you?" He said, "You don't drink beer, do you?" He had lived in Atlanta, he said. Atlanta, he said, was hard. He said that a couple of times.

I went outside to smoke. Sat down someplace else. Then it came time to line up, and he lined up behind me. We got on the bus, and I got into an empty row of seats and he asked if he could sit next to me. I was wrestling my stuff into the seats, and my backpack went flying off into the aisle. And I said, "Not if you're going to talk all night."

I felt like a jerk -- for not shutting down the conversation sooner, for being so reluctant to put up with a little bit of leaning and talking, which it's not like he could have done anything to me, really, and maybe a little bit for not wanting to talk to him in the first place. Instead I wound up sitting next to a 21 year old kid who, on the phone before the bus took off, explained to someone that bus trips always made him nervous, and I stared out the window and listened to my music.

Song of the Day: Genesis, Land of Confusion