Icky

2019-08-05T19:44:51Z

Friday was nearly pretty good sliding toward awesome. My supervisor let me out early as a 10 year anniversary gift -- yes, I've been doing this work for 10 years now -- to see a movie, Odds Against Tomorrow, that I'd been wanting to see for approximately 40 years. (First boyfriend's introduction to Modern Jazz Quartet, their music was one of the early things we bonded over. I'd never seen the film. Now I finally have.)

For those who are interested, many reviewers have called it the last true film noir. All I know is that it dealt with racial issues far more explicitly than I thought a 1959 film would. Harry Belafonte was good, most of the rest of the cast was good, too. It showed the underbelly of New York really well. The single most surprising shot of the movie for me was one showing the highway approach to one of the bridges. It was nearly empty.

Followed up the movie with Vietnamese for dinner with neotoma, and she even bought me coconut cake for dessert.

That was all the "pretty good sliding toward awesome" parts. Seriously. If Friday afternoon into evening had just been that, it would definitely have been at the awesome end of that scale.

Getting to the movie was a problem. For those of you who aren't in the District, I'm back in a boot for a bad ankle. I have three more weeks in the boot, followed by six weeks of physical therapy. If that doesn't work, then the podiatrist and I are discussing surgery on the tendon. I think it's the posterior tibial tendon. Anyway, that's over a month out.

Being on the boot and a cane, I try not to get into scrums on the metro, so when four other people all lined up at one door, I went to the other. They walked down to my end to sit for some reason. It was a nearly empty car. One was a girl that I think was about ten, but might have been a couple of years younger. Two of them were teens with one looking more like the lower end of the scale and the other -- the one who kept trying to use the supports to "pole dance" might have been as old as seventeen. The fourth seemed to be in the same age range until I got a good look. I think she was mid to late twenties.

The oldest was the one doing the most messing around. She pretended to twerk at several points, asked to see my tablet (I explained it was a Kindle, showed I was reading a book on it, and told them I tended to buy new ones in July when they're cheapest.). The youngest was more interested in the river out the window while we were above ground and was very quiet once we went into the tunnel. At some point the oldest asked which stop I was getting off at, and I said, "Metro center." She just said, "Oh, that's after us."

The car filled up more about three stops in and three stops after that, L'Enfant Plaza one of the places to switch lines, they got up to go. I nodded at them. The doors to the platform opened and one of them -- I don't know which -- flung an open bottle of something (I thought Gatorade from the smell, but when I saw the bottle, it didn't look right.) at me.

The bottle didn't hit me. It was plastic so it didn't shatter. The liquid covered me. I had damp sticky patches in my hair and I kept finding them on my skin until I got home that night. None of that mattered in the first few seconds because the liquid got into my eyes. It was two stops before I could open them properly. I blessed my lucky stars that I'd taken home an open bottle of milk from the office so that I could use it to bathe my eyes. Someone gave me an antiseptic wipe and told me to wipe my face and hands as we didn't know what else could be in the bottle. I was offered water. Someone gave me a whole packet of Kleenex to help me wipe the worst of it off or up depending upon the surface. The boot has a slick sole when wet, so someone helped me cross the spilled liquid as I got off to change lines.

There were so many good, kind people. I can't stress that enough. The incident makes me feel unclean -- nasty -- in spite of all the good people. And I'm sorry about that. Most of the people who helped me confirmed they threw it at me. They weren't pulling a general prank.

I know that I'm lucky this weekend. Very lucky. They threw a liquid that stung my eyes but didn't damage me in any permanent way. There are people dead, injured, or mourning after the events of the weekend. Not me, and I know that's wonderful.

But it still felt icky.

comments

DC needs your help

2017-01-25T14:19:22Z

Several people have asked me how they can help DC protect itself from the ravages of the current congress and administration. I have an idea.

DCist has an article about the current abortion law before congress. There's also a link to a "death with dignity" law with which congress is trying to interfere and, though there's no link, mention of a gun law which the House, especially, has already tried to overturn. They've already interfered with our decriminalization of marijuana laws, leaving us in the awkward position of not being able to regulate a trade which, through taxation, would help us immensely.

Call your congress people and Senators. I don't care if you agree with DC's law. I disagree with the "death with dignity" law and the only reason I don't disagree on abortion is that someone who doesn't have bodily autonomy isn't a full citizen in the eyes of the law. I see anything forbidding the right to choose as a slippery slope to women no longer being seen as full citizens. After all, it's been less than a hundred years since we were seen as full citizens. The point is actually more powerful if you disagree.

The point is that we have Home Rule. The point is that congress is not allowed to interfere with Boston, Denver, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Memphis, Nashville, Seattle, El Paso, or Portland, OR all of which are cities within 50,000 of our population. If the US Congress passed a law that said only the citizens of Seattle had to turn in their personal guns, everyone would rightly be up in arms (no pun intended). If they passed a law that said only the citizens of El Paso were required to have a gun on them at all times, the NRA might be happy, but the rest of us would be up in arms.

The more conservative the state you live in, the more powerful the statement. It's primarily, though not exclusively, Republicans and conservatives who are putting their fingers in our pies. Many of them are the same Republicans who shout from the mountaintop that the Federal government shouldn't interfere in local laws -- like those "religious freedom" laws and "bathroom bills."

Call. Please call. Call often. Adapt one of the sample scripts from thesixtyfive.org. More than anything else, make certain that you say your are their constituent and that you support the District of Columbia's right to autonomy in local matters. It can also be phrased as support for the District's right to Home Rule. While you're at The Sixty-five, pick another call to make. This isn't going to be a short haul on any issue. If you call your congress critter on another issue, throw in a "and don't interfere in the District of Columbia's local laws" at the end of it.

Thank you. Spread this message any way you can.

comments

fabrisse

Icky

DC needs your help