crazywonderful

On Wednesday night, Laura sat down with her marking to watch a nature show on television. One of our cats, the small black one, is addicted to nature shows; when they’re on she walks right up to the TV and sits below it, staring intently. Occasionally, she gets up on her hind legs and whacks at the elephants or ostriches with her paw. (I worry about her eyes, having been convinced by my own parents that the television emits vision pulverizing death rays that stop exactly three feet from the screen.) The show they’d tuned in to was about how animals pick on other animals that are different. Specifically, Spook and Laura were watching the story of an albino chimp whose peers were making its life a living hell. Instinctively. Being a teacher, Laura was fascinated by this evidence of bullying in the animal kingdom. It depressed the hell out of me, so I retreated to the office.
The next evening, on the way home, I pulled out my book on women’s development and mentally prepared myself for the effort ahead. Reading academic writing on sky train is not an easy thing for me. It requires extreme amounts of concentration, and I have to be well rested and unable to overhear the conversations of anyone around me. During rush hour, it’s next to impossible, and yet for some masochistic reason I continue to try. Thursday, instead of standing, I scored a seat next to the window, which diverts energy from my balance and hanging on functions and helps greatly with my concentration. Then a woman I judged peripherally to be in her late fifties or early sixties sat down beside me. I could sense without looking that her hair was coiffed in a fashion my grandmother would approve of, and she proceeded to pile all her bags on her lap, including a black handbag so sensible it was sucking all the frivolity out of the surrounding area. As we rode eastward, the bag lady kept one hand on her purchases and the other braced against the seat in front of us. This was a bit odd, and caused me to spend several distracted paragraphs pondering to just what degree abnormality needed to exist before it became problematic in public.
Several stops went by, and the train got busier. I was reading the paragraph defining mutual intersubjectivity for the fifth time when the bag woman jabbed her thumb into my thigh. Alarmed, I looked up, and she pointed frantically to her left. I tried desperately to figure out what she was indicating, since we didn’t seem to share much in the way of a common language, but failed miserably. She jabbed me again and leaned toward the left, so I leaned too and followed her gesturing to the floor, where something small and furry was sitting under the chairs across the aisle. A few more stops passed like this before the train cleared out a little and I caught a glimpse of the animal’s owner. Picture Grizzly Adams, from the seventies TV show, post-apocalypse. His thin brown hair was in a long ponytail, and he was missing teeth, the knees from his jeans and any evidence of body fat. He looked like he was carrying his entire world on his back in one of those gargantuan dirty red hike-across-Europe packs, and his entire family was sitting at the end of the leash he was holding, wildly scratching behind its small ear.
Unless they are guide animals or in a cage, furry family members are not allowed on skytrain, but I didn’t want to stare. Besides being taught it’s rude, I’ve learned that on public transit, eye contact should be avoided. Coming home from class last week, it took only a one second glance to elicit (from the creepy guy I walked two cars out of my way to avoid, onto what turned out to be an otherwise abandoned car, only to have him follow and sit in the seat directly in front of me, singing “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” in several drunken keys at once) “Hey, Beautiful, got a transfer? It’s my birthday tomorrow.” (Well, that’s just great. And me without a present. Maybe I’ll just come over there and sit on your lap for a second, what do you say?) I much prefer to tune out to the extent that people I know have to abandon calling my name and wave their arms in my face to get my attention when they see me passing by on transit.
Poke, poke, went the bag lady again, bursting my bubble. “What is called?” she pointed, in case I had forgotten her recent obsession. “I think it’s a ferret,” I said, too loudly, and the owner looked up at me and smiled semi-toothlessly, nodding. The young women around him were talking in extremely animated voices, and he appeared to be trying to simultaneously answer their questions and pet his ferret any time one of the girls had it held against her chest. The bag woman kept clucking her tongue and laughing, and poking me intermittently to update me on the status of the ferret, which she claimed had fleas, because it couldn’t seem to stop scratching itself. I kept nodding and pointedly refocusing my attention on my book. After about the fifth jab, I wanted to say, “Look, lady, unless the ferret can explain alloplastic modification to me, I do not give a shit.” This seemed a tad harsh, though I was developing bruises from her incessant prodding, so I held my tongue, and felt virtuous when she disembarked shortly thereafter. Ferret Adams stayed on after my stop, no doubt headed for Surrey, where no one will stare, because he will fit right in. I got off at Burnaby, where I fit right in, or imagine I do, anyway. It’s possible we’re all just a bunch of freaks headed in the same direction.
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Questioning/Examining:
How ab does normal have to be before people start looking at you funny?
Grateful/Relieved:
That the things that make me truly strange are somewhat hidden.
Regret/Deny:
Losing my last piece of chocolate behind the computer.
Pondering/Obsessing:
Why is the zip-zop sound that corduroy pants make so satisfying?
Whistling/Humming:
Landslide – Stevie Nicks (Day seven, and counting.)
Reading/Scanning:
The Bitch (S)HITLIST
Shout out to:
Past and present residents of Cut-N-Shoot, Texas.