The filthy whore of Christmas.
I love Christmas, I love the whole Christmas season. You don’t come up with a crazy plan to do all new art for an online advent calendar without loving Christmas. You just don’t. But sometimes I find it hard to keep in the Christmas spirit.
I don’t have a car, some people call this poverty, some people call it being green, I call it an extreme sport, especially at Christmas. I have to plan in advance when I start bringing Christmas presents to my mom’s house. Because if I try to do it all at once… well… I won’t be able to carry everything. I can only bring what I can carry. Lucky for me I have broad shoulders and a strong back.
That’s what led me to be standing on the corner, carrying a heavy backpack (full of beer, sketchbooks and my laptop) and two heavy shopping bags full of colorfully wrapped presents. I was wearing my favorite sweatshirt, the one with long cuffs with the holes cut into them to hook onto your thumbs, a blue sherpa jacket, with my Red hat with white trim, with the furry pompom and red and white scarf. I must have looked like a vagabond santa gone rogue. The patron santa of the homeless and restless. The light had just turned and I had carefully stepped away from curb to let the cars pass.
The next three or four cars passed and the next car stopped. I glanced up at the light thinking, that it had been so short, only to see that the cars still had the green light. This car was asking me to cross against the green. She gestured for me to cross but I didn’t. There were about twelve cars behind her. She gestured again. I pointed to the light. As she drove by me she shouted angrily “I WAS TRYING TO BE NICE!!!” I couldn’t help shouting back “YOU HAD THE LIGHT!!!” And then she yelled “YOU FILTHY WHORE!!!” I was shocked.
Now I could have handled that better, she was trying to be nice but it’s not really nice as a pedestrian, to be forced to cross against the green light. It really isn’t. It can be dangerous, it’s not nice to the cars behind you, it puts the person crossing on the spot. There is a reason we have traffic lights. It was a nice day out, and I had been waiting patiently for the light to change. I’m sure I did look burdened by my heavy bags but I’ll tell you something about carrying a lot of stuff. It’s not easy to move it all quickly. It’s a lot of energy to get it all going and to hustle across the street. And I was enjoying my break from moving all of this stuff. Yes she was trying to be nice to me, but she wasn’t being nice to the folks behind her. I was just obeying the traffic laws. But I’m the filthy whore?
If I were to it over again I would have shouted Merry Christmas instead of you had the light. I would have kept to the spirit of the season. But I still wouldn’t have crossed the street. If I’m a filthy whore I think I should stand on street corners.
1 comment:
Filthy whore? *Really?* I can see something involving "ingrateful"....I mean, if she was really offended that you didn't allow her to fill her "Random Act of Kindness Per Day" quota.... Perhaps "filthy ingrate," or even "ingrateful whore" if she also had a quota to fill for the daily "Call a Random Stranger a Whore."
Perhaps she was running behind on her daily quotas and decided to lump together "Call a Stranger a Whore" with the "Question Someone's Hygiene" daily fulfillment. After all, people are quite busy this time of year.
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