!Lout

I'm headed to the east coast tonight for the first time in 4 months, and leaving work a bit early to do it. This is one of the longer stretches I've ever gone without heading back east for at least a bit. It's nice not to be traveling for work, although it does seem a bit surreal that I actually won't be working at all while I'm there. Vacation in this case actually means vacation.

I'm getting on the bus, and a very drunkish guy gets on the bus after me. I'm not paying very close attention to him. I grab a seat, and he sits down a few rows up from me. I'm looking out the window, when I hear a very loud woman's voice saying "I'm sorry you can't sit next to me with that", followed by some mumbling by the guy. The woman follows up with "You're going to have to move", and then more mumbling from the guy "No, YOU'RE going to have to move". The woman then yells out "Driver, this man needs to be removed from the bus, he has alcohol!". The driver looks back, disinterested and says he'll take care of it at the next stop. Meanwhile, the woman and man BOTH get up and move, the woman to the front of the bus and the man to the back where I am. At the next stop, the driver gets up and goes to talk to the guy, and asks him if he's bothering that woman. The guy replies "No, she's just a moron". The driver asks him where he's going, and he says downtown, which is the opposite of where we're going. The driver tells him that he doesn't need to be on this bus, and the guy drunken-politely says he'll get off the bus.

The woman gets on the phone and laughingly tells whoever she's talking to that she'll have a funny story for them later.

This kind of confrontation seems unusual for these parts, and I feel like it wouldn't happen that way elsewhere. In NY, both ppl would have swore at each other for a while and then grumpily walked away. I feel like that woman only spoke like that because she feels completely impervious to any dangerous outcome. A cabbie in Sydney once told me that Americans were too quick to shake fists at each other, because they knew that no one would actually hit them. That goes double for the northwest. I'm glad that there's not a ton of violence out here, but that's no reason not to be civil, even with drunk people.