zibblsnrt coming out of the secure area, though.***
Had a bit of a weird experience tonight, I leave Luns after we grabbed a bite to eat at the Chinese place in downtown Berkeley we both go to. He walks home to his place in North Berkeley, and I go hiking to my bus stop so I can get home at some point (I live in the Rockridge area of Oakland, there's a bus once an hour in the wee hours of the morning to take me there, and it leaves at seven past the hour every hour.
Now, most of the time, I wear highly gender neutral clothing (blue jeans and t-shirts). Most of the time I'm out and about, I wear a Cal baseball hat around, and in the winter, I'm often wearing a flannel jacket over my t-shirt. Combine this with a highly gender neutral presentation (I'm tall and round and look somewhat like a linebacker candidate, have a somewhat deep voice, and grow a bit of a beard because of some medical problems), and you have somebody who has been called 'sir' by store clerks a few times. (I'm enough of a tomboy to find it amusing.)
However, I have to remember occassionally that this isn't going to save me every time I'm alone at night, and that I really ought to be more careful who I talk to. I'm walking to the bus stop, and this black male spots me and won't leave me alone. Now, he seems harmless enough, and the street's well-lit and trafficed enough that I don't think he'll try anything stupid, and we fall into chatting, and I discover he's from Kenya (and I don't doubt this, the accent sounded about right) and he's having some hard times, and pretty much just needs somebody to listen. And I'm waiting for a bus, so I'm sorta a captive audience anyway.
And then he asks for a hug. Your humble narrator, being somewhat of a kind soul, decides to acquiese, and that's what got me into some trouble. Because he tried to use the hug to give me a kiss. Ew. Luckily,
zibblsnrt will be happy to note that I did learn something while I was in Nova Scotia last, and that's roughly what the face of somebody who's about to kiss you looked like, and I was able to break it up before he landed it. Which lead to the following dialouge:"You wanted it."
"No, I told you, I have a boy I love." (I often refer to Zibb as 'the boy' in conversation, as a shortening of 'boyfriend'.)
"Yes, but I'm a man!"
I have never, in my entire life, been happier to see the 51 pull up.
*shudder* Luckily, I was able to learn from this mistake without having anything horribly bad happen to me. But blech. if it wasn't for
zibblsnrt and a bunch of my other friends, I'd wonder what good men are sometimes. 