The past few weeks had been filled with work, stress, bad roommates, more work, jerky people, acne breakouts, and bad roommates. Did I mention bad roommates? They were the type of weeks I’m thankful to be over with, and will suppress all memory of (snap! just ended a sentence with a preposition…the sky didn’t fall). In the midst of it all,\u00a0I encountered two incidents on the bus that were suprisingly uplifting.<\/p>\n
I actually went an entire night without sleep; I got up at 7:30am (re: Good Morning!)<\/a>, worked that entire day, that entire night, and the next entire day. In the\u00a0university community “burning the midnight oil” may be the norm for some, but I\u00a0am someone who requires\u00a07 to 8 hours of sleep. My circadian rhythm\u00a0was solid like Barack (take that, Sarah Palin!). Nevertheless, at some point I found myself taking the\u00a0bus during the early commute when\u00a0the bus was packed, and I had nowhere to sit. I was quite loopy from sleep deprivation, and I remember having difficulty keeping balanced. A skater guy (he was holding a skateboard, hence my labelling) who looked no older than 14 or 15, tapped me on the shoulder, and offered his seat to me. I was so startled\/touched by his random act of kindness that I remember having the urge to ask him if he was a unicorn, and reaching out to touch him to see if he was real. With so many evil forces in the world (terrorists, cellphone companies, the Republican party), that young person reaffirmed my believe that there is still some good left.<\/p>\n The second incident happened a few days ago. A girl had her head leaning against the window on the bus and was doozing off to sleep. A guy to this girl’s right was getting up to pull the “stop request” cord that was next to that girl’s head.\u00a0The bus jerked violently and caused the guy to loose his balance and accidently slap the girl on the face. Now, it was not a slight nudge or prod, it was an open palm, clean slap across the face. There was an audible gasp, and perhaps communal teeth clentching and\u00a0toe curling amongst the passengers.<\/p>\n What happened next truly amazed me. The girl, reflexively, broke into laughter and for reasons beyond my comprehension, so did everyone else including me.\u00a0<\/p>\n In my mind, being slapped across the face is\u00a0perhaps the most insulting thing one could do to another.\u00a0Such\u00a0a denigrating\u00a0insult is usually reserved for extreme situations such as\u00a0on soap operas when adulterers are confronted. Hence, one must have\u00a0committed a severe vice to warrant a slap on the face.\u00a0The last place one expects to be slapped is\u00a0by someone losing their balance on\u00a0the bus, and perhaps, it is this unlikely occurence that we found funny. It was\u00a0quite a Jackass<\/a> momment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The past few weeks had been filled with work, stress, bad roommates, more work, jerky people, acne breakouts, and bad roommates. Did I mention bad roommates? They were the type of weeks I’m thankful to be over with, and will suppress all memory of (snap! just ended a sentence with a preposition…the sky didn’t fall). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":264,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/264"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":174,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/wetsocks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}