dear lady: chill out
Had a Bus Lady episode already and I've only been in the city eight hours (!)
So's I'm riding the MUNI back from the Embarcadero Center (I got shaving cream - needed a reason to go out and explore) and White-Haired Lady starts to get on the bus. She's got two laundry baskets piled high with opaque black plastic garbage bags, filled with - treasure? Body parts? Laundry? Who knows! But she's got them, and she's loading them on to the bus, obviously having a rough go of it, having to knee-scoot them up a step at a time.
Now, Middle-Aged Chinese Woman is near the front of the bus, and she gets up to help the white-haired lady. At this point, one of the laundry baskets is occluding the stairway, so she has to bend down real low and grab hold of the basket and tug it up while waddling backwards. At this point, it's kind of comical and endearing. It's occuring to me that hey, I should really help out, but at this point I'm still pretty tourist-shy and I don't really know what the public policy is on this kind of stuff - I'm suffering from crowd inertia, basically.
At this point, er, it kinda goes bad and not-so-endearing-anymore.
Someone emits a piercing shriek - nearly baby-grade. My head snaps up and I notice this grey-haired woman who'd been sitting down reading a paperback quietly for the last ten minutes, and who is now pressing said paperback to her chest in shock. "You bitch! You stepped on my fucking foot!" she -screams- in incommensurate fury. Middle-Aged Chinese Woman looks apologetic for the roughly three seconds that Bus Lady allows before (not making this shit up) Bus Lady starts whaling on Middle-Aged Chinese Woman with the book.
I start to my feet and shout "Hey!" and am totally ignored by absolutely everyone on the bus. The poor chinese woman swiftly manuvers around the crazy bitch, past me, and hangs on to the handrail next to the middle door. Crazy bitch starts muttering, well, not really muttering because it's completely intelligible because she is being -extremely loud- about it, things to the tune of 'I can't believe you'd do that to me,' 'next time you try that I'll knock out your fucking teeth,' etc. I start to half-formulate an objection but I realize it won't do a damn thing, so I keep quiet.
The assault victim is standing right behind me and I turn to ask her quietly, are you okay? She says yeah, I'm fine. I ask her, would you like to sit down? She bursts into tears.
I apologize and face forward and feel horrible and think about what I could have done differently for the next ten minutes.
After a little while, the chinese lady calms down, and she's talking again. Someone makes a little joke about the crazy lady (under their breath), and she laughs a little, shakily. I turn around again and say, I'm really sorry about that. She still seems shaken up and keeps repeating, you know, I saw she was sitting there, but I honestly didn't think she was that close, I tried to move to the side so I wouldn't bump into her... I try to reassure her that it's not her fault, that it was an accident. "God bless you for being nice to that other woman, by the way," I point out.
"Not very much, apparently," she says.
When the white-haired lady gets off, I help her off the bus with her laundry baskets, keeping an eye on Crazy. When the nice woman exits, I wave goodbye to her but she's in a hurry and not meeting anybody else's gaze, and she doesn't notice.
I generally try not to moralize Anything That Actually Happened because I'm prone to simplistic mappings and in any situation there is a wealth of knowledge that can be extracted that tends not to perfectly convert to tidy little colloquialisms. So, if you -do- try to extract knowledge that tends to poeticize well, it's an information-destroying transform, like mp3-encoding - the little inexpressible sideband stuff gets lost as you focus on the big sweeping moral themes. This situation, though, I think I know what I'm taking home from it.
In most any locale I'm going to feel out of place, and I'm going to have tendencies to sit back and observe and try to derive the parameters of acceptable behavior. But! In any locale, there are a wide variety of people - there are inexplicable people, there are Bad people, and there are kind and generous people. I think I know the kind of person I want to be. Doing the right thing earlier might not have made much of a difference in this situation (except that with my weight, crazy bitch's foot might actually have been broken, haha) but I think I would have felt a lot more comfortable with the outcome.
So's I'm riding the MUNI back from the Embarcadero Center (I got shaving cream - needed a reason to go out and explore) and White-Haired Lady starts to get on the bus. She's got two laundry baskets piled high with opaque black plastic garbage bags, filled with - treasure? Body parts? Laundry? Who knows! But she's got them, and she's loading them on to the bus, obviously having a rough go of it, having to knee-scoot them up a step at a time.
Now, Middle-Aged Chinese Woman is near the front of the bus, and she gets up to help the white-haired lady. At this point, one of the laundry baskets is occluding the stairway, so she has to bend down real low and grab hold of the basket and tug it up while waddling backwards. At this point, it's kind of comical and endearing. It's occuring to me that hey, I should really help out, but at this point I'm still pretty tourist-shy and I don't really know what the public policy is on this kind of stuff - I'm suffering from crowd inertia, basically.
At this point, er, it kinda goes bad and not-so-endearing-anymore.
Someone emits a piercing shriek - nearly baby-grade. My head snaps up and I notice this grey-haired woman who'd been sitting down reading a paperback quietly for the last ten minutes, and who is now pressing said paperback to her chest in shock. "You bitch! You stepped on my fucking foot!" she -screams- in incommensurate fury. Middle-Aged Chinese Woman looks apologetic for the roughly three seconds that Bus Lady allows before (not making this shit up) Bus Lady starts whaling on Middle-Aged Chinese Woman with the book.
I start to my feet and shout "Hey!" and am totally ignored by absolutely everyone on the bus. The poor chinese woman swiftly manuvers around the crazy bitch, past me, and hangs on to the handrail next to the middle door. Crazy bitch starts muttering, well, not really muttering because it's completely intelligible because she is being -extremely loud- about it, things to the tune of 'I can't believe you'd do that to me,' 'next time you try that I'll knock out your fucking teeth,' etc. I start to half-formulate an objection but I realize it won't do a damn thing, so I keep quiet.
The assault victim is standing right behind me and I turn to ask her quietly, are you okay? She says yeah, I'm fine. I ask her, would you like to sit down? She bursts into tears.
I apologize and face forward and feel horrible and think about what I could have done differently for the next ten minutes.
After a little while, the chinese lady calms down, and she's talking again. Someone makes a little joke about the crazy lady (under their breath), and she laughs a little, shakily. I turn around again and say, I'm really sorry about that. She still seems shaken up and keeps repeating, you know, I saw she was sitting there, but I honestly didn't think she was that close, I tried to move to the side so I wouldn't bump into her... I try to reassure her that it's not her fault, that it was an accident. "God bless you for being nice to that other woman, by the way," I point out.
"Not very much, apparently," she says.
When the white-haired lady gets off, I help her off the bus with her laundry baskets, keeping an eye on Crazy. When the nice woman exits, I wave goodbye to her but she's in a hurry and not meeting anybody else's gaze, and she doesn't notice.
I generally try not to moralize Anything That Actually Happened because I'm prone to simplistic mappings and in any situation there is a wealth of knowledge that can be extracted that tends not to perfectly convert to tidy little colloquialisms. So, if you -do- try to extract knowledge that tends to poeticize well, it's an information-destroying transform, like mp3-encoding - the little inexpressible sideband stuff gets lost as you focus on the big sweeping moral themes. This situation, though, I think I know what I'm taking home from it.
In most any locale I'm going to feel out of place, and I'm going to have tendencies to sit back and observe and try to derive the parameters of acceptable behavior. But! In any locale, there are a wide variety of people - there are inexplicable people, there are Bad people, and there are kind and generous people. I think I know the kind of person I want to be. Doing the right thing earlier might not have made much of a difference in this situation (except that with my weight, crazy bitch's foot might actually have been broken, haha) but I think I would have felt a lot more comfortable with the outcome.