Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Ew.

Dear Members of the General Public:

One


If you are crammed in next to someone in a double seat, and another double seat empties out just a small distance away from you, move to that seat. (I got stuck on a nearly empty bus squished against the wall by a somewhat portly 40-something lady for about half an hour the other day. I chalk my rage up to hormones, but it would have irked me anyway. I nearly punched her.)

Two


Four in the afternoon is a totally inappropriate time to save a seat for someone who isn't even on the bus yet:

Middle Aged Lady: Is anyone sitting here? [indicating a double seat with a bag on it, and a third seat next to the girl who is guarding the bag. She has her feet on the seat. They are wet and sandy.]
Hoodlum Child: My sister's sitting there. She's standing up there by the bus driver.
MAL: Two people to four seats?
HC: Our friends are getting on soon. [Meanwhile, 85 people who are already on the bus have nowhere to sit]

(Later, HC's sister finally came to sit down (the friends never arrived). She was going to sit down but saw that HC had made the seat all gross with her dirty feet. So she sat in the next seat up. HC put her feet right back on the seat. This bothered me way more than it should have.)

Three


Please do not foray into the street and onto the bus if you *smell strongly of cats. It's nasty to the average person. But pregnant women already struggling with motion sickness will barf on you.

Four


Please do not frequent a restaurant if you smell strongly of musty attic and marijuana and dirty socks and some other undefinable vileness. Same reason. Only this time change "women" to "waitresses".

You people were wondering why I hardly ever went to your table. Why you had stacks of dishes everywhere. Well, first, it's because you piled your plates with more food than your average half-ton man could eat and then only ate two bites. And then went back for six more similar plates. And there were ten of you. It's hard to keep up with that. Also, I like to make you look at what you're wasting for a good long time (like rubbing a dog's snout in Bad Things He's Done, not that you're animals; you're people, so please act like people).

But mostly it was because every trip to your table was an unpleasant reminder of what I ate for lunch. And you don't want **recycled hummus plate down your neck, no matter how good it was the first time around


*Oh please. You can own lots of cats and not smell like them. I know a family that owns an illegal number of cats, and somehow they still manage to smell like roses (the people, not the cats, though the cats don't smell bad).

**If you live in Madison, you must visit oh crap. I cannot remember the name of this place. But it's got a green overhang with white letters, it's on the south side of State Street near the west end, somewhere between Frances and Lake Street Mediterranean Cafe. I finally remembered! Actually, no; I went there again and made sure to take a good long look at the sign. Delicious. I have the hummus plate with chicken and extra sauce (I like to mix it with the hummus, which is a little too sharp sometimes). Oh, but it's tiny and always busy. So make sure you have time.