Today,
someone drove by me as I was
standing at a
crosswalk, and one of his
passengers screamed out the window at me : "
FatAss!"
I shrugged, and walked across the street with the $30 worth of groceries I'd just purchased. I stood next to an annoying hippie who insisted on playing a bongo inside the reverberating bus stop, hopped the bus, and came home. *That* is what really happened.
What happened in my head in the 3 seconds following that moment, of course, was quite different. As I registered what was being screamed at me, I leaped from the sidewalk into the back of the truck, leaving my groceries behind. This mental me, of course, has no need to care about the 30 bucks I spent on that food, that money constituting the bulk of the money in my checking account at the moment. So, I leap into the back of the truck. I know that's some leap. No, I don't know whether I accomplished it because I was a cyborg or a mage or something, I only thought about this for a few seconds, please let me continue. Thanks. So I'm in the back of the truck, and I violently reach through the glass back window of the truck into the cab and pull the amusing passenger out into the rushing air and sunlight by the scruff of his T-Shirt. I leap again, onto the sidewalk, his friend coming to a squealing halt some ways down the street, on the side of the road. I'm holding him by the neck now, and I say to him, very authoritatively. "What the hell went through your head? Why did you scream, randomly, out the window at me? Of all the fat people you've seen today, you picked me, undoubtedly not the fattest person you've seen today, to throw insults at. Why?" At this point, I drop him to his feet, and allow him to speak.
This is the point where I stop thinking about it, of course. Someone who throws random insults out the window at people he doesn't know is, frankly, so far removed from my personality that I can't even begin to speak for him in my head.
The interesting thing about this encounter is the mixed feelings it brought up. Obviously, I don't appreciate being insulted by someone who I don't know. Made me a touch angry there for a moment, but that passed quickly. What I found interesting was that it actually made me feel.....normal. All through high school, that was pretty much my whole thing. "Get yelled at randomly by people in trucks" was a gig I had. Once a day during the week, twice on Fridays. Someone I didn't know, a young lady, screamed "FAG" out of her $20,000 car-what-her-daddy-bought-her at the last school dance I went to. I don't know what that says about me.