Last month I wrote my column two weeks late. This is because I was driving very slowly on the highway and it took me that long to get from Tahlequah to my house. But I have finally made it home and am ready to find out what happy memories people have been making in these final weeks of summer.
We’ll start with this post:
It used to be that you could get away with all sorts of uncouth behavior by being a pudgy older lady. Now that I’m finally aging and weighing into that demographic, I’m being robbed of my right to rudeness.
Since none of us were there to witness the infraction, we’ll have to stipulate what may have happened that isn’t part of the narration. One person says, “Maybe you didn’t hear a quiet ‘excuse me’ in the crowded store while you grandly filled the aisle.”
Others tell us what they would do if they were in a situation where someone was taking up the whole dang aisle in a crowded shop. “When that happens to me, I just go elsewhere and come back to the spot later, I don’t touch strangers.”
Personally, I put on football gear and plow through head first.
The original poster (OP) fills us in on more details. “I was feeling pretty terrific after finding some really great things, really happy. I was for sure distracted flipping through so many many unique choices, I did have a rather large arm load of merchandise so yes, I was and usually do take up more than my fair share of space. Still doesn’t mean others get to shove me out of their way. Thank you.”
I feel like the word ‘shove’ is doing a lot of work here. I’m trying to picture the profound strength of this lady who is capable of a full unbalancing shove with just two fingers to the elbow. She must be a Jiu-Jitsu master.
One commenter puts it this way: “I applaud this awesome yellow-wearing fat elderly short stranger with the dehumanizing 1 finger death shove.”
We recreate memories every time we recall them, and in each retelling this story is getting more confrontational and dare I say violent.
One commenter is deeply sympathetic. They say, “How traumatic for you! I’m sure you’ll have PTSD from your horrifying encounter with a white woman. Not to mention she was pudgy AND older. A dangerous combination for sure. I just pray you can somehow get past this nightmare encounter.”
We get this clarifying question from an islander: “Was it an employee or customer?”
The difference matters. Employees have the right of way in the workplace. Some stores even allow their district managers the right to Prima Nocta.
OP responds, “Another customer. Granny’s staff is always courteous and kind.”
This just goes to show that you’ve never been invited to Granny’s after hours MMA free for all.
Commenters turn the tables and show actually it was the poster who’s being rude by describing a person. One says, “As an older white woman, I feel it would be better to respect an elder with different descriptive language.”
OP says, “I certainly could have used less offensive language to describe the woman who decided I didn’t even deserve an apology after she pushed me aside but I didn’t. I apologize.”
I don’t know. Saying someone is dressed in yellow and pudgy isn’t unkind. I thought it was a cute description and I immediately felt fondly toward the older woman.
A person who sounds like my doppelganger says, “I’m an old white woman who is pudgy as well. How was the description offensive?”
Others disagree with me. One says, “Pudgy is commonly considered derogatory and commenting on others bodies, as well as touching others bodies without consent, is also a no.”
After much back and forth, OP gets frustrated and says, “Just a literal description, using adjectives to describe a person is apparently wrong all all levels, got it.”
You just gotta use finesse. Try something like:
Her raptor claws scratched at my innocent, supple elbow as she bared her jagged teeth and hissed through the wrinkled hole that had once been a mouth. The rough fabric of her urine-colored dress scraped against my delicate leg.
Apparently, this is not the only boundary pushing incident that’s happened at Granny’s.
One person says, “I was in grannies last week and an elderly lady with a basket was forcing her way into my path several times without any, ‘excuse me’.”
Another tells us, “One time I witnessed a pillow fight between two women at Granny’s. Both wanted the same pillow. ”
Granny’s is the Thunderdome.
Op ends the thread with some reflection. “In hindsight, now that I understand better, the way she redirected me was grandmotherly. I could have described her as gently redirecting me from behind in a particularly familiar way a grandma would have done to a grand child. I could have said she had the appearance of an older woman, wearing the coziest creamy yellow cardigan, like a grandma any kid would love to cuddle. I didn’t chose those words.[…]I do hope it will cause others to pause and think about showing each other a bit of common, or not so common decency and kindness.”
Growth! I would like to thank everyone who commented on this thread for leading an islander to a place of personal growth. We all worked hard for this. A big round of applause.
Granny’s isn’t the only palace where we tick each other off. We also have the road.
This is just gonna end up being bunches of pictures of my rear bumper.
I love how the poster assumes it’s passive aggressive behavior. Like, other drivers are doing it to you on purpose to spite you, specifically. Maybe you are not the hero of reality, and people are just living their lives, completely oblivious to your existence.
One astute commenter makes this point, “Boo hoo leave early.”
OP asks, “how early? 10 minutes, 20 minutes? an hour? Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to know when boats will be on time, overloaded, or behind schedule.”
There’s an app for that! It’s called NW Ferry. It shows where the boats are and lets you know if they’re running behind. For boats where you pay to get on (such as Point Defiance) it even tells you how many spots are left on the next boat.
I like how even the little glyph of Chetzy looks like an evil clown, which is what I always see when I look at the Chetzemoka.
But back to the comment thread. One impatient driver says, “I agree. I swear there is some type of list where people take turns going 10 mph under the speed limit just to hold everyone up.”
Shit you guys! They’re on to us! We are no longer clean on Op Sec! My text messages must have been leaked!
Another commenter says, “…and invariably those same slow people will speed up so you won’t pass them”
When we hear your engine rev, we realize you want to go faster, so we speed up for you, on account that we are in a no passing zone and you’d be a dangerous fool to actually pass us.
One clever member says, “If a slow driver is the reason you miss the ferry, you left waaaay too late already and that’s on you. Manage your time better instead of trying to manage other people.”
OP says, “don’t tell them what to do.”
But, you are specifically telling other people to speed up! You started out by telling people what to do!
OP goes on to say, “This means; you don’t understand that people have lives. Your assessment of their schedules, or the exigencies of life we all experience,…are what you wish to act like a grade school hall monitor over. Your lot in life isn’t to act as the gatekeeper for whatever affects their lives. Your ethical obligation is to get the fuck out of the way …specifically because…you have no clue what’s behind anyone else’s need to do at least the speed limit…if not more.”
True, I don’t know what exigencies of one’s life would cause them to habitually leave their house five minutes too late. But it’s clearly on me to drive faster to accommodate whatever imagined horrors this person had to survive in the five minutes between when they should have left and when they did leave.
Or, as a commenter succinctly put it: “Your inability to manage your life and your time doesn’t entitle you to police others’ lives in order to compensate for your failures.”
OP is convinced that a slow driver is not just an inconsiderate person, but a member of the Stasi (an organization that no longer exists) whose sole purpose in life is to infringe on the right to free travel. This may sound like hyperbole, but they actually say it. Here are their own words: “This simply means-> you just place yourself into the privately, self appointed role of ‘Front Door Bouncer’ or East German Checkpoint Guard…in the public domain of freedom of travel…while telling us all that you can divine the value of their time or the nature of their circumstances.”
Might I suggest gently touching the car in front of you on the elbow so that they know to move aside?
OP goes on to create complex scenarios whereby leaving the house late and speeding are preferable to managing time responsibly. They say, “This false narrative, and its unethical premise you keep pushing about the false idea that it’s the singular variable of “planning” being spoken to… or that “planning” exists as the singular variable in life’s equations…- > as if that’s what actually defines the meaning/intent-demands of people you know nothing about?…is precisely why great numbers of people on the road are – at the hands of a very small number of individuals like you …. very irritated or righteously angry people…with lives you know zero about…..who completely understand the insatiably Hun-like social schema’s of people like yourself, who need to impose upon others, their own painfully sphincter locked lack of appreciation of the world of possibilities which you know nothing about.”
I love that saying ‘leave early’ is a false narrative, but then the commenter goes on to imagine scenarios to explain why someone would be late. In the first one, a daughter gets sick in the car on the way to school and the driver has to turn around and rush to the nearest ferry only to be waylaid by a semi truck that is getting inspected. I will not include the whole comment, because it is long and ellipsis-laden.
Their next example is a lead surgical nurse at Swedish who normally gets to the boat early but is, you guessed it, waylaid by a family emergency. Then, because she is trapped behind a driver going 34 in a 40 zone for the 4 miles between town and the North End ferry, misses the boat by (hold on … calculating ) 1 minute and 3 seconds.
My friend, you are a very imaginative writer who can come up with lots of nail-biting scenarios. Might I suggest becoming a screenwriter? Honest to god, I would read a story you wrote. Provided you edit out the ellipses.
A commenter decides to point out some plot holes in the story concocted by OP. They say: “So the lead surgical nurse at Swedish hospital chooses to live on an island with unreliable ferry service, doesn’t even catch the boat before, drives 15 miles over the speed limit to make up for lost time, and can’t figure out how to get a hotel room over town the previous night?”
I get that we live in a society and have to accommodate the needs of people in ways that are often inconvenient. But that goes both for us saintly slow drivers and the heathen speed demons. You expect us to drive in a way we feel unsafe to accommodate your lack of planning and endless exigencies. We expect you to just deal when we drive a little slow.
One self-aware islander says, “I love it when I flip out and pass them aggressively then we both end up getting on the boat just fine. Embarrassing!”
One person adds, “Your frustrations with the detour aren’t my problem, my car is brick shaped and handles in a pretty brick like manner. XoXo, we live in a society.”
Oh my god, how has no one complained about the detour yet! Six! Miles! To get around a 100 yard stretch of road. It was supposed to happen in summer but got delayed and is now happening at the start of a school year where they just cut two bus routes!
Some very smart and observant islander make the following points: “Haven’t you figured out yet that there are very few safe places to pull over? Are you going to stop and pull my vehicle out of the ditch when I pull over for you and end up in a hidden grass covered ditch or down an embankment?”
Another brilliant islander says, “Not everything is about you. Some of us value the animals and people that also share the roads. Often the trees make terrible shadows that can end up like driving with strobe lights. And as you mentioned, why should other people be forced into a dangerous driving situation so you can get to a ferry dock where there is no ferry?!”
Oh my god! Those tree shadows!
One commenter says, “I just remind myself that everybody but me on Vashon is high, and that’s why they drive so slow. They probably think they’re speeding. Doesn’t stop me from venting to my friend that I must have been driving behind another stoner again.”
If we can make up scenarios for fast drivers, then we can make them for slow drivers too. Whereas a person driving dangerously fast is obviously a nurse trying to get to the hospital to perform an emergency operation on her child who just got sick on the way to school, a person who is driving slowly and carefully in poor lighting conditions is clearly stoned.
Wait, that one slow driver mentioned how the tree shadows look like strobe lights. You know where you see strobe lights? At raves. And you know what people do at raves? Cocaine. The slow drivers are probably all on cocaine, which is widely known to mellow people out and make them drive more slowly.
As a final note, I would like to remind people that the speed limit is a maximum and not a minimum.
We’ve covered two minor inconveniences that we’ve blown entirely out of proportion. But now it’s time to talk about a much more serious matter. We have this post:
This is in reference to how the Loop published a gross anti-trans article, where an opinion writer for the paper talked about how trans people shouldn’t be allowed to play sports, use public facilities, access hormonal therapy, or generally have the full host of rights that come with living in a society.
I understand the word cancel to mean something akin to ‘unsubscribe,’ but a lot of commenters take it to mean ‘throw someone down a well and pelt them with rocks.’
Anonymous 810 says, “Canceling is so 2020. How about we cancel being cruel to each other for having different opinions? How about we cancel hurting other people because we don’t agree? How about we cancel cancel culture?”
Canceling just means deciding not to consume media made by people who promote harming people. Would you put out free fliers from the KKK in your establishment because, even though you don’t agree with them, you believe in freedom of speech?
An anonymous commenter says: “why do we have to cancel anything? You don’t agree with it, don’t read it. I don’t agree with a lot of what you say and believe but I’m not here trying to cancel you. I think everyone needs to stop canceling and start listening. What makes your belief and opinion better or more righteous than others? What makes one parties view better or more right? There’s no answer because it’s preposterous.”
Okay, to highlight, you say, “You don’t agree with it, don’t read it. “ My friend, that is canceling. You are supporting canceling.
Also, you ask what makes some beliefs and opinions better than others. If you have a belief that leads you to act in a way that harms others, then that belief is bad. If you have a belief that causes you to act in ways that do not harm others, then that belief is better.
Another anonymous commenter, or perhaps the same one, says: “The irony here is that people are demanding that someone be silenced in the name of creating an inclusive community. But inclusion doesn’t mean only including people whose opinions we approve of. If it does, then we’re not talking about inclusion….we’re talking about conformity.”
Tolerance is a two-way street. You do not have to tolerate people who do not tolerate you. You do not need to include people into your group who, once included, would push you out.
Anon adds: “And honestly, that is the part I find most concerning about Vashon. We seem to have created a social environment where there is a very specific set of beliefs you’re allowed to express publicly, and anyone who steps outside that boundary gets treated as though they are inherently bad people. That’s not progress. That’s just a different kind of tribalism.”
Okay, but the article was published in a free paper that is available at many local establishments. So the person is not being censored. A person on the internet asking other people to not engage with a specific form of media is not censorship. It’s advice. And the bad opinion we are complaining about was published and widely distributed! We are not saying you can’t express bad opinions. We’re just saying there are consequences for writing in support of harming other people. One of those consequences is that people will stop reading any publication that publishes your work, and they will recommend that other people also stop reading it.
One wise sage says, “This is all so stupid and unproductive. Why don’t we all just go down to Den of Pin tonight from 5-9 for some sliders and smoked Mac and cheese bites and play some pinball, which is never political, and contemplate all that we have lost? They have $5 beers for crying out loud. THAT WILL SHOW THEM!”
Okay, I may be a couple weeks late, but I’m heading out now. Grab me a slider, please.
People being like ‘but my free speech….’ don’t seem to appreciate that it’s also free speech to tell people to shut up. Or, as OP puts it, ‘It’s my free speech to say ‘don’t platform this speech or I am withdrawing any further support from your business.’ That’s the ‘free market’ in action.”
Another person says, “God forbid anyone think differently than the masses.”
The thing is, the piece in the Loop corresponds with the narrative put out by the current administration and multiple state legislatures. It’s led to the internal displacement of over 100,000 Americans.
It’s become the status quo belief, and it needs to be challenged. The best place to make a difference in the prevailing narrative is in your community and among people who know you.
So asking local businesses not to carry or advertise in a newspaper that published a bigoted opinion piece is not an act of conformity. It’s actually going against the grain in an attempt to change an overarching harmful mindset.
We have limited time on this Earth, and it would be impossible to read everything ever written. So when choosing what to read, feel free to skip the stuff that sucks. You are under no obligation to read any particular thing. Except for my column. Read it every month or I will cry.
We were all at each other’s throats a lot these past two weeks, so I will leave you with this final post. It had no comments, so I hope someone sees this and helps out this poor hungry snake who just wants to eat naked escargot.
Author: Anna Shomsky
I'm a former teacher and a data engineer living on Vashon Island. My writing has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Broken Spine, Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. I wrote and produced the radio show Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. I’ve had short stories published in the anthologies Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project.
