A triple-venti helping of schadenfreude

During the nine years that I have been living in New York, I have picked up several local customs:

* Calling carbonated beverages "soda" (I fought that one for a year and a half; I much prefer the aural pleasure of the Michiganism "pop")
* Taking the subway until all hours, or until it really behooves me not to
* Identifying our pizza delivery guy, Eddie, on the phone just by his voice

Then there are the local customs I very intentionally have not taken on:

* Calling a purse a "pocketbook"
* Standing "on" line instead of "in" line
* The accent

And then there is the one custom that, despite my very best, most aggressive intentions, I can't seem to get quite right:

* Barreling through crowds of pedestrians on the sidewalk, flinging them willy-nilly in my wake of fabulousness

See, I was raised with the belief that one should go out of one's way to make others as comfortable as humanly possible. The women in my family are effusive, tend to be eager to please, and they do things like serve grand displays of food to others and send thank-you notes within two weeks of any event in which copious amounts of gifts are received. These are all good things, of course, and I appreciate these values, but over time I found that certain behaviors carried over into my own body language and carriage. (And I dont think this is just a Garfield Thing; I think this is common of most women, especially those who grew up in the Midwest.) So I eventually started getting the feeling that I was the only person in this entire Great City of Ours who moves out of other people's way when they're walking on the same sidewalk. I began to feel invisible. Passive. I began to feel too accommodating. And I began to feel grateful anytime someone did it for me, but I also began to feel I could count those incidences on one hand. And I began to get pissed off. And I liked that.

As of yesterday, I have entered the ranks of Road Warrior, Hellion on Concrete. Mess with me and I'll cut a bitch.

Also, bear with me. This story involves lots of walking, which doesn't make for an exhilarating read or anything. See, there I go again. Accommodating. Anyway.

My therapist's office is near Union Square, which is colorfully crowded on a regular day, but on a day like yesterday — the perfect spring/summer day, cloudless blue sky, cello quartet playing in the square, everyone licking ice cream cones and each other — it was insane. People people everywhere. So there I was, walking around people people everywhere, getting stuck behind people stopping in their tracks to check out the scene, and I was getting annoyed. I was running late and felt precious minutes ticking away from my therapy session every time I had to veer out of my way so some oblivious hipster could pass me without even mildly adjusting their route. Dude, if you take one step to the left, we can both get past each other. No common courtesy. You suck!

I crossed 14th Street and headed down University. Walked another block. Walked another. Then, just before I hit the group of protesting restaurant workers chanting behind a barricade in front of the Saigon Grill (slave wages, asshole management, don't eat there), a group of women walked toward me. The woman on the end closest to me was paying no mind to her surroundings, and I felt a huge veer on my part coming on because she clearly was not the type to move herself. So I'd have to shoot directly right, but not all the way because then I'd hit a street vendor (cute beaded bracelets!), and then I'd have to wait for them to pass so I could keep going forward.

I wasn't having any of it.

I moved to the right a little bit, but decided she'd have to work with me, she'd have to compromise and move a little bit too, to avoid a collision. But she didn't, and we slammed shoulders. Usually when that happens, you say, "Excuse me," and keep going. But see, it was better than that:

She'd been carrying a completely full, super-huge coffee. She lost control of it and the entire thing spilled all over the sidewalk. And I swear, maybe I felt empowered by the chanting anarchists behind the barricade, maybe I was emboldened by my new very cute pants, but the cold, cold blood rushing through my veins flipped out into a disco inferno, and my steely heart leapt a triple lutz. I was thrilled. I know making somebody spill their coffee is technically no big deal, but I felt excellent.

She stood there with her mouth agape, mourning her coffee carcass. I looked back, said, "Sorry," and basically skipped to therapy. I'll admit that the conciliatory part of my brain thought for a split-second to take responsibility and offer to buy her a new drink, but then the Marla Garla, Warrior Princess part of my brain kicked in: "She deserved it," it said. "You don't watch where you're going, you're gonna lose a beverage."

When I walked into my therapist's office, she looked at me and said, "Wow. You're doing REALLY well." It actually was a pretty crappy week, but at that moment, I felt better than I have in ages. Later in the evening, there was a lot of talk about how it was a metaphor for my desire to not let selfish people take advantage of me. I had splashed another person's misfortune over the ground and I got down and rolled around in it a little bit, and it was mighty satisfactory. And I don't even feel like a bad person. I'm fine with that.

In other news, I had this involved dream last night in which I was having an affair with Larry Birkhead, who was evil and wore a red Speedo to bed, and then I had dinner with Howard K. Stern and his parents who were CRAZY, and then I had to drive Anna Nicole Smith to some farm in the country and all these kittens were crawling in my green truck and we played with the kittens but only two were ours.