About 20 years ago, shortly after Mr. S and I got married, we’re walking to our car from the Kmart, holding hands.
Him: mid-30s, 5’6", slim build, long wavy brown Jesus hair, beard, wearing either jeans or shorts, probably a T-shirt.
Me: mid-20s, 5’7", medium build, very short brown hair, wearing either jeans or shorts and either a T-shirt or tank top (not buxom at all), big dangly earrings, ginormous purse.
Gradually we become aware of someone approaching us from behind. As the person, an older man, overtakes us, he says to us with a big smile, “Must be a mother and son!” Then he sees our puzzled faces, does a slight double take, and quickly veers off in another direction.
I don’t know which of us was supposed to be which.
“Bless your heart” usually meant you had just poured out some misery for her, unless she said it stingingly… It was usually meant kindly.
Perhaps he meant Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, which would have been about due west (possibly northwest) of where I am guessing you are describing, at Shattuck and Vine?
I agree, I don’t go to Richmond. The people whom I know who live there don’t recommend it. Good food comes FROM Richmond, however!
Set your mind at ease. 99.999999% of the time, “bless your heart” is absolutely sincere and friendly. She, more than likely, was not being insulting or condescending.
So, this past weekend, several of my female friends came up to the city I’m living in for a music festival. My band played, we had a great time, we all walked around to other venues and hung out. Good times. Eventually, they left for the night when one of my friends started to feel nauseous and headachy.
The next morning, I texted what I thought was her number to check on her (“Hey, are you OK this morning?”). I guess I had an old number, because a few minutes later, an indignant woman called me back with a “AND JUST WHO IS THIS?!”
“Uh, sorry, I must have had the wrong number.”
“I guess so, you SLUT!”
Now, I’m a 6’1", 230 pound man with a relatively deep voice, and while I do not dismiss the possibility that a dude can be a slut, I don’t think that’s what she was driving at.
“Now, look. I was trying to get in touch with a friend of mine with whom I went out last night. She got sick and had to leave. I apologize; I must have had an old number for her.”
“You whores () need to stop calling my HUSBAND’s phone!”
OK, lady, you have yourself a batshit day, OK? I see you’ve gotten off to a fine start already.
Some years ago while on a bus that took us from our rental car to the Denver Airport, we were listening to a couple of guys discussing the sale of a car. Apparently these people were using something like Craig’s list as the cars they were discussing were from different states. One person loudly proclaimed 'There were two Mustang’s for sale, one from Green Bay and one from Wisconsin".
My traveling companions looked at each other and silently mouthed 'WTF?"
Didn’t faze either of the people discussing the topic at all.
For those of you not in the US, Green Bay IS IN Wisconsin.
I was talking to a British guy (he was tanked) and when my French friend arrived the issue of nationality came up… me mentioned that his daughter had married a Muslim, and that was fine with him, but the rest of them are all terrorists. Not as bad as the Jews, of course, he added. Thinking he was joking about all this, I mentioned that I’m half-Jewish by birth. He then proceeded to educate me about the Jews’ ideology:
He pointed to the nearest building and said, “That building is full of innocent people. The Jews wanna blow it up. That’s their ideology.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yeah,” he continued. “And let me tell you this right now, if you ever, EVER blow up a building with my daughter in it, I will kill you and every fucking member of your family. I will slit all their throats.” He jabbing my chest with his index finger at this point. “Don’t you EVER fucking blow up a building if my daughter is in there.” I promised him I wouldn’t. He reiterated this point several times, and also insisted that the British never lost a war. He didn’t take kindly to my remark about the American Revolution.
The stories about Asia reminded me of another more recent experience.
One night I was hanging outside of a 7-11 in Taipei smoking a cigarette and waiting on a phone call. An old but not-so-crazy-looking Taiwanese man walks over smiling and asks, “Are you American?” I replied that I was. “Are you teaching English here?” I replied again the affirmative again. Here’s where it gets weird.
He says, “I’m going to tell you something! People from China are Chinese people, people from Japan are Japanese people, people from America are American people. Right?”
I nodded companionably but didn’t speak, thinking he hadn’t reached the point yet. He, however, took this as a sign that I didn’t understand, and repeated the whole monologue, except this time he added to the end, “Lincoln freed the slaves! Right?”
I could only agree with him. He repeated the whole speech, including the Lincoln bit, three more times before walking away. He didn’t even say goodbye.
So me and a friend (I’m half white, half black and he is a pretty dark black guy) were outside a bar in Latvia smoking when a Latvian girl walks by, stops, does a double take and exclaims in complete surprise “Ohhh…niggas!” and walked away. We both launched into a short string of profanities until she turned around, came back, and said “No no…I only see you on TV”. She then proceeded to rub both of us on the arm and then look at her hand. We asked her just what exactly she was doing and she responded “I just wanted to see if it came off”. Turns out, we were the first people of color she had ever seen in person and she didn’t know if it was permanent or not. She ended up coming inside with us and having a couple drinks…still one of the weirdest moments of my life.
Heh, maybe it was a wierd sort of come-on line by her.
I had an amusing moment on a bus in the Issan province of Thailand (which is near the Cambodian border) more than 20 years ago now - I guess tourists were rare in those parts. A couple of Khmer-looking farmer women came on the bus, and evidently found the appearance of my girlfriend and I most hilarious (we are both very white in skin, and I have a large nose - the locals are very tan and have small features). They proceeded to point out, feature by feature, the things about us they found funny - my big nose, that I was very tall (I’m 6’ and the locals tend to be petite), our skin, and especially my GF’s very delicate fingers (they, farmers for life, have hard working hands).
They were very pleasant about it, we were not offended in the least - it was just odd to have complete strangers go over you feature by feature like that - for example, one of the women grabbed my GF’s hand and placed it on her own to show the contrast, then burst out in laughter.
You know, you changed your story a lot. From your original telling, you were the WTF. Then you said “Oh, by the way, the bus was empty and he sat down right next to me.” Then you said, “Oh, I did talk to him. I said there was another seat over there.” Very different.
I have the same “neutral” expression on my face. A few times I’ve been approached by a total stranger and commanded to “Smile, it can’t be that bad”. So, I now tell them that I have Bells Palsy. That usually shuts them up, mainly because they don’t even know what it is.
I was at the store a couple months back buying some strawberry plants and got behind this woman who was waiting for her mother to come back with her checkbook or something. While we were standing there she commented on the fact that the strawberry plants had those biodegradable pots. I nodded and said I’d never used them before so I wasn’t sure how well they worked. At some point she mentioned the fact that I needed to weed my garden once I planted them (no duh??) and I kinda laughed saying that the only weed I had was a mint plant that I couldn’t get rid of. She immediately got irate and told me that GOD put that mint plant there and I had NO right to be talking about ripping it up like some sort of WEED. At that point her mother came back with the checkbook and I was just standing there, unsure how to even respond to that. For the rest of her transaction she constantly gave me some pretty nasty glares.
A few weeks ago, I was exiting a convenience store behind a woman who was talking on her cell phone. She held the door for me and I said, “thank you”. She was yapping away on her cell phone as I walked to my car and I overheard her say (obviously so I could hear), “some people are so rude, they don’t even say thank-you when someone holds the door open for them”. Then, she glared at me. I just shrugged my shoulders…
Another time, I was picking up my food from the drive-thru at Taco Bell near where I worked in San Francisco. As the lady handed me my bag of food, she said, “Do you know Jesus?”. It was very odd, because at the time, I was dating a guy by the name of Carlos, and Carlos had a good friend named Jesus. So, I said “yes, I know him, I just saw him last night…is he a friend of yours too?”. She didn’t pronounce Jesus the Spanish way, so I’m not sure why I associated the two.
So I’m getting drunk up here in Copenhagen, Denmark, rockin’ a spiffy varsity jacket and a vaguely 50’s-ish haircut. I march up to the bar to grab some beers for me and my mates when an big old guy in a leather jacket turns around in his chair to tell me that I look “just like James Dean.”
I go “hey, thanks, that’s nice,” assuming that’s the end of it. But the guy immediately fires back: “No no no no no, wait a minute, wait a minute… Did you just say nice?”
I go “yeah, sure, ‘nice’… As in, that was nice of you, I mean… To say what you just said.” But the guy keeps it up: “No, but you said ‘nice’? What’s ‘nice’ about what I just said? What do you mean, ‘nice’?” Assuming the guy is probably just fucking with me á la Joe Pesci in GoodFellas, I try to de-escalate: “Right… Well. OK. Uh… Take care.”
And that probably would have been it – a pretty forgettable attempt by some random douche to pick a fight with a stranger – if he hadn’t decided to suddenly push the creepiness factor waaaaaay up to 11 by delivering the following line, endlessly quoted and re-quoted by my friends in the years since: “So… OK. Let’s say the following happens. Let’s say… I rape you. And film it. And then put the vid on the Internet. Would that be… ‘nice’?”
Close enough to a stranger, I guess … I took my two kids into the dentist’s office on Monday for exams and x-rays. The hygienist was mentioning that our insurance company doesn’t cover fluoride treatments for children, and her outraged expression was, “That’s just so … so … UNCHRISTIAN!!” WTF? Does she really think that Wellpoint bases company policy on the bible? I was flabbergasted.
Now, I’m a 6’1", 230 pound man with a relatively deep voice, and while I do not dismiss the possibility that a dude can be a slut, I don’t think that’s what she was driving at.
