Matters of Public Health
I saw my first live and in-person mask of the Great Swine Flu Panic of Ought-Nine yesterday. It was a young woman walking up Broadway by NYU. Given the amount of filthy hippies in the NYU area I understand her concern. Fortunately I was on the bus and didn’t have to worry about street germs.
Physical well-being isn’t the only worry in today’s fast-paced, on-the-go, cliché-ridden urban society. Mental stress is a real factor as well. For instance, the Line Lady got called on her Line Lady-ness this morning! As I was boarding the bus I heard a male voice behind me urging her to board the bus first. She demurred, he insisted so she slowly and unwillingly went first. He stood behind her and said “Now don’t you take the seat I was going to choose! You better not get the last seat!” though of course at our stop the bus is usually at most half-full. As soon as Line Lady chose her seat the gentleman looked up and said “That was where I wanted to sit!” He smiled and Line Lady laughed nervously. I wonder if she had a nervous breakdown when she got to work.
The guy who confronted her is my hero though. Or he might be the most evil person in the world for not letting some poor woman just live with her control neurosis. Maybe he’s both. Maybe that makes me evil. Or maybe the fact that I think what he did is evil combined with the fact that I’ve never done it makes me good. This life thing is complicated.
There’s a story by Tove Jansson that I just started reading called “The Squirrel”. She was most well known for her Moomin stories that I’ve mentioned before. “The Squirrel” is from a collection of her stories “for adults”, even though I would argue that the Moomin stories are great for adults as well as children, but anyway this is a non Moomin story. It opens on a November morning on an island in the Finnish Archipelago. A woman of a certain age is going about her morning routine when she spies a squirrel outside her window, and….
“She tried to remember everything she knew about squirrels. The wind carries them on pieces of wood from island to island. And then the wind drops, she thought with a touch of cruelty. The wind dies or changes direction and they drift out to sea, it turns out to be not at all what they expected. Why do squirrels go sailing? Are they curious or just hungry? Are they brave? No, just ordinary and stupid.”
Yeah. Me too.
Physical well-being isn’t the only worry in today’s fast-paced, on-the-go, cliché-ridden urban society. Mental stress is a real factor as well. For instance, the Line Lady got called on her Line Lady-ness this morning! As I was boarding the bus I heard a male voice behind me urging her to board the bus first. She demurred, he insisted so she slowly and unwillingly went first. He stood behind her and said “Now don’t you take the seat I was going to choose! You better not get the last seat!” though of course at our stop the bus is usually at most half-full. As soon as Line Lady chose her seat the gentleman looked up and said “That was where I wanted to sit!” He smiled and Line Lady laughed nervously. I wonder if she had a nervous breakdown when she got to work.
The guy who confronted her is my hero though. Or he might be the most evil person in the world for not letting some poor woman just live with her control neurosis. Maybe he’s both. Maybe that makes me evil. Or maybe the fact that I think what he did is evil combined with the fact that I’ve never done it makes me good. This life thing is complicated.
There’s a story by Tove Jansson that I just started reading called “The Squirrel”. She was most well known for her Moomin stories that I’ve mentioned before. “The Squirrel” is from a collection of her stories “for adults”, even though I would argue that the Moomin stories are great for adults as well as children, but anyway this is a non Moomin story. It opens on a November morning on an island in the Finnish Archipelago. A woman of a certain age is going about her morning routine when she spies a squirrel outside her window, and….
“She tried to remember everything she knew about squirrels. The wind carries them on pieces of wood from island to island. And then the wind drops, she thought with a touch of cruelty. The wind dies or changes direction and they drift out to sea, it turns out to be not at all what they expected. Why do squirrels go sailing? Are they curious or just hungry? Are they brave? No, just ordinary and stupid.”
Yeah. Me too.
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