Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Got harrassed as An Man yesterday. First time for everything, I guess. To be fair, the belligerent fellow trainsit passenger was VERY drunk, and also asked me if I was Black, so, not winning the perceptivity awards for the week.

Drunk Man, boarding train: "Aw yeah good afternoon mate, how are ya?"
Me, wedged in to the single seat beside the doors of an OSCAR motor carriage, with my suitcase in front of me: "Ah yeah not bad".

Drunk Man proceeded to various pronouncements, like asking me if I was Black (I am not only not Indigenous, nor of African or Islander descent, I am very pale, and was dressed for work in the CBD. And I don't have a shaved head any more. Not that people of colour don't wear blazers and ties, but there was nothing about me that might cause a drunk white guy to make an offensively stereotyped association based on clothes or hair, unlike, say, the time that a drunk African guy in Geneva cat-called me, in English, with "Hey lady, you look like African Queen!" based on, I assume, my shaven head). On the other hand, he also called me "big fella". He was loud and socially inappropriate, but did not seem to be initially aggressive.

At some point, he came over to my side of the carriage, and loomed through the glass that divided me from the designated doorway egress zone. Then he lurched over to the same spot, opposite me. At this point, I was ignoring him entirely, and mostly still listening to my podcast with reasonable focus; but I made eye contact with the woman opposite me to make sure she knew I knew she was also in an uncomfortable position.

The woman opposite me, I realised, was a Virgin Australia flight attendant, still in uniform. After a few minutes, she got up and came over to stand next to me, taking up the hand-hold spot by the doors on my side of the carriage. Initially I had thought she might have felt threatened with him standing in that spot on *her* side, but, as became clear, she had gone into "work mode" and was looking out for me.

Mr Belligerant sat down in her seat. This was good, because I was starting to worry that he'd fall over as the train swayed, leaving us with a Medical Incident on our hands. Mr Belligerant was muttering and burping for a while, and I became very anxious - concerned he was going to puke right onto my suitcase.

I was so concerned about this iminient puking situation, and the alternative possibility that he'd pass out just as we entered the more remote streches of the line along the Central Coast, that I didn't really pay attention to what he was saying. I was comforted by the presence of Ms VirginAus, because one can assume that a flight attendant will keep her head if there's a medical emergency.

Roughly around Mooney Mooney, I realise Mr Belligerent is aggressively shouting "I'll blow ya", at either me or the general air. At this point, I suppose he might be having delusions (and perhaps he was). But if it was a proposition, to either me or the spectres in the air, it was made very aggressively. As a threat.

So baffled am I by what seems to be an aggressive threat of fellatio, that I make eye contact with Mr Belligerent. "What are you looking at cunt" was definitely aimed at me, and from there he escalated to various other insults and exhortations to me to get up (presumably to fight him, although with enough "I'll blow ya" that the possibility of incitement to public sex acts was still plausible).

Ms VirginAus mouths "are you okay?" at me, and I assure her I am. I am uncomfortable, but not scared. Aside from the baffling possibility of aggressive fellatory threats, and the one racial enquiry, nothing about this seems to be targeted or personal: he just doesn't like my face. Maybe he's mad because I answered him once and not again. Who knows. I have my suitcase between me and him, there's glass boxing me in, and I'm still more concerned that he might puke on my stuff than about physical violence.

I have too much baggage to get up and move, especially as the carriage is jam-packed. I now realise I should have asked Ms VirginAus to help me move my stuff to the other end of the carriage - make a perfectly reasonable announcement that I wish to use the lavatory, but my stuff is here, and the loo is in the other carriage. Or I could even have just given Ms VirginAus my seat to "mind my stuff" and gone on a loo expedition . But I still haven't processed that Ms VirginAus is protecting *me*, that she's gone into full Work Mode and she's simultaneously assessing the situation (not escalating) and looking after me.

My plan is that when we get to Woy Woy, I will get out, and just get into the next carriage. I can't go through to the next carriage while travelling, as we're in the fourth-from-rear carriage: Mr Belligerent and I, in opposite seats, are both jammed up against the wall of the driver's cabin. He's banging aggressively on his side of the wall, in fact. This does not lead to anything, because it's an 8 car train, and there's no one in the middle-of-train cabin.

Next Mr Belligerent gets up, further shouting at me to "get up you cunt". And now, it transpires, I should prepare to get out onto the platform at Woy Woy and fight him.

It is now extremely clear that I'm not being homophobically harrassed or threatened with gay-bashing, but invited to an Affray. In my time in private court transcription services, I typed enough local court hearings to know that "One or more drunk guys don't like the look of one or more other guys on a train, invite them to an Affray at the next station" is quite a common occurrence (often between white men and men of colour, sometimes between ethnically diverse groups of blokes on the basis of assumed gang territorial incursions, sometimes between white blokes for no good reason) and scripts out differently to your average gay-bashing.

This poses something of a problem for my "quietly exit the carriage at Woy Woy" plan. Mr Belligerent is now wavering in the middle of the carriage, rather than standing at the holding-on-pole opposite Ms VirginAus. Ms VirginAus is very tense. Later, she will say to another passenger that of course she's had self-defence training, and I belatedly realise she hadn't been alarmed in the same way I was, but preparing to defend me and/or intervene if I or another man got into it with this guy. I have no idea how she was gendering me, but hopefully if she WAS reading me as a man she'd realised I was not going to escalate.

I decide that actually, I do have to contact someone. I can't get up to call the driver via the help point, because if i get up, Mr Belligerent's script will start scripting. I don't think this is a "call 000" issue, and I'm at the wrong angle to read the info sticker to see if there's a "text transport police" number - and I can't see the carriage number either, because another passenger's head is in the way. I decide to tweet @ TrainLinkNorth, describing the service, carriage-from-rear, current location, and problem. We have not long crossed the Mooney Mooney bridge; there's a fair way to go until WoyWoy, someone will probably see the tweet and alert the driver or tell me what to do.

No sooner have I drafted this tweet than we hit the Hawkesbury black spot and the tweet won't send. Mr Belligerent gets louder and more sway-y.

A tall, middle-aged bloke comes up out of the downstairs half of the carriage, gets in between Mr Belligerent and me. I brace for Worse. Mr Tall says "Oy, mate, keep your voice down." Mr Belligerent yells something.

Mr Tall, to his credit, stays out of arm's reach, and does not raise his voice more than his first interjection. "Mate, this is the quiet carriage!"

To everyone's bafflement, Mr Belligerent breaks and runs, down into the downstairs of the carriage. Mr Tall follows, and those of us left in the front vestibule listen as a hullabaloo ripples through the downstairs and out of earshot.

At this point, the passenger who had been blocking the carriage number turns to me and Ms VirginAus and asks if we're ok. Ms VirginAus checks on me multiple times in rapid succession. Someone tells me that "we" have called the police (possibly fellow travellers of Mr Tall?), before the mobile reception dropped, and the situation will be sorted at Hornsby.

It becomes clear to me that everyone else is treating me as if I've been seriously threatened. I meanwhile have been quite sure that as long as I stayed with my suitcase in front of me, tucked into my one-seat nook, I'm not going to be hurt, although getting up would have been a risky idea. They all make sure I'm not leaving at Woy Woy (I am not).

At Woy Woy, the train is delayed a little (we were already late leaving Sydney) while Mr Belligerent is removed. Everyone asks if I have someone meeting me at Gosford, but I am in fact going through to Newcastle.

Over the trip from Woy Woy to Gosford, I talk a bit more with Ms VirginAus, and she talks to the remaining men in the vestibule. It slowly dawns on me that she's far more shaken up than I was. She doesn't sit down, but rides from Woy Woy to Gosford standing in front of her original seat, with one knee up on it. "I don't have any authority here," she says to the bloke who'd been on her other side through the Hawkesbury. "We get self-defence training, of course, but..."

She'd gone into Work Mode, with both emotional labour (looking after me) and threat assessment - but she didn't have any authority, so she couldn't take the early interventions she would have taken on a plane, and she had neither the back-up of colleagues nor of the legal authorities a flight attendant has when at work. And, depending on how she read me, she was either entirely surrounded by men, or by all men bar one intimidated dyke. Miscellaneous other men trying to deal with Problem Men on trains is one of many routes to Affray.

If I had fully processed how she was dealing with the situation, I would have said more during the ride through to Woy Woy - explicitly said (it's not like Mr Belligerent was listening) that I knew as long as I didn't get up and no one else got in his face, Mr Belligerent was the only person seriously unsafe here (risk of falling over on a moving train while drunk).

I ended up posting on Twitter, tagging in Virgin Aus, asking them to pass my thanks through. Then I've spent a chunk of time this morning trying to get through robot responses and seemingly-not-robot but the person hadn't read my tweets properly responses in order to convey *praise and thanks*, no this isn't a complaint. You should not be sorry to hear about this incident with [name], you should be proud of her and you should also get a message through to her manager and have someone check on her. And maybe advise your staff not to travel in uniform on their commutes! I'd hate to think that she was putting herself through stress, and at risk, because people would expect as much from a uniformed flight attendant.

When I finally got picked up by Dad and Ms15 from the bus stop out on the main road (I had left work early to catch the ultra-express train so that Dad could pick me up and still be in time to pick up Ms15 from her work - but then the train was delayed so I cooled my heels in Newcastle and caught the bus), I told them about it. The experience of Dad trying to indirectly figure out if I had been subjected to some kind of demographically targeted harrassment, without specifying which demographic, was quite entertaining (not that I blame him - I know perfectly well that the point in transition where I might start copping fag-directed homophobia, I'm ALSO the most stands-out-in-a-targetable-way dyke I've ever been, and Dad sure doesn't have the vocab for that).

No! That's the weirdest thing about it all! In fact, it's finally dawned on me that Mr Belligerent may have been shouting "I'll go ya", not "I'll blow ya", meaning I have been subjected to 100% demographic-neutral bloke-on-bloke aggression (unless he did think I was Black, I suppose). Truly, we live in a Society.

It is, in places north of the equator, mid-autumn festival. In countries that actually cross the equator, possibly the local translation of the Chinese word(s) for "autumn" makes sense. The dominant English translation of the Chinese word(s) for "autumn", however, makes no sense when applied to Australian Septemebr-October.

There are many compromises to this: eg, in Darling Harbour (the touristy bit that's closest to Sydney's Chinatown), the current festival is known as Moon Festival. I don't actually know what local Chinese groups call it, but I have picked up enough from observing Asian-Australians chatter to guess that whatever the PRC diaspora call it does not map on to what other Chinese-calendar-using Asian-Australian communities use.

I am this year particularly endeared by World Square, a shopping mall that sits in a high-traffic nexuus of the Sydney SBD, near traditional Chinatown, informal-Koreatown, the District and Local Court legal sector (not to be confused with the Supreme Court "legal district"), and a couple of well-established theatres. I remember World Square being built when I was first working in retail a few blocks further down into the CBD. Currently, World Square provides me with gluten-free burgers AND an Asian supermarket that stocks Hojicha in tea bags.

A few weeks back, World Square started decorating with lanterns, white bunny figures, and cherry blossoms, for spring. The stores therein, meanwhile, stock mooncakes, as one might expect for mid-autumn festival. Eventually, I caught sight of some corporate branding, and they've dubbed this combination "mooncake season". I love it and endorse it, even though I cannot eat mooncake.

---

Some Individuals seen lately:

Hijabi, in the underground bit of world square. She was wearing... let me describe this in the order it struck me: a lavender hijab, in what I know as the standard style in Aus. Pools around the shoulders, doesn't have a built in sun visor, may or may not have an under-cap. Black button-up jacket, black flared mid-thigh skirt. Purple tights. Black docs. Black salior/police type cap with shiny buckling across the frontage of it. I beamed at her and she looked so unnerved that I had to clarify "Great outfit", and she did a little shimmy of surprised pleasure.

Two small girls, on 30 september, in red bodysuits with black spangled skirts and witches hats, waiting for a train with their presumably-parents.

Guy pracicing whip-cracking in Belmore Park

Man on a bus who jumped down to open the wheelchair ramp, but the wheelchair user in question didn't wish to board, and the bus driver had some choice words to say about the uninsured public interfering with his job. Man kept arguing he was being helpful and he "used to be a bus driver, cunt". He was baffled when the bus driver radioed for police assistance to get him off the bus, and outraged at the suggestion he had been swearing. The police, predictably, had better things to do than deal with an aggro but not yet physically violent Member Of The Public, so eventually the bus got underway again. I was fascinated by the fact that, when other passengers remonstrated with him about swearing with the bus driver, he was unaware he had done so. And indeed he had not said "shit", or "fuck", or "bloody". Had he said any of those I'd assume he wasn't paying attention, but there was method to his anti-social behaviour, and I do strongly suspect that he doesn't think of "cunt" as a swear word. FASCINATING.

1. Man in Belmore Park, playing fragments of The Last Post on a saxophone. This turned out to be a warm-up: he proceeded to smooth jazz. He did not seem to be busking, merely practicing his solos.

2. The same red-headed child on the train two days running, accompanied by what turned out to be her nanny. On the first occasion, the child offered me an incomprehensible observation, so I responded, as I do to small children and cats, with "ooh, really?" and "sounds serious". The rest of the train tried to ignore the weirdo talking to the baby. On the second occasion she was too tuckered out from the previous day's trip to the acquarium to have anything to say, according to her carer.

3. Asian man in an off-white trackie top (the kind I grew up calling a Sloppy Joe, except it's not sloppy any more, they are fashionable now) which had, in smallish embroidered print, the words "Bread and Butter" and even smaller below it "delicious".

4. The Cryptid Lady of Belmore Park, of whom I have heard from colleagues. I must have passed her many times, because I have certainly seen her seagull crowd, but only today did I notice her sitting on a shady bench. One assumes she is the direct cause of the corflute signage at the edges of the park exhorting one not to feed seagulls, because she brings in a granny trolley full of bread and distributes it to her admirers.

1. Picture a real estate agent. Go on. Now, I picture two kinds of people: a miscellaneous human, and a Real Estate Agent. The miscellaneous type may be any gender, and is most often found in letting agent roles. The Real Estate Agent may be a letting agent, but only as a starting point. They are most archetypically a man, in a sleek but slightly-too-shiny suit. This weekend's Individual was in a chequered suit, probably individualised rather than uniform. It fitted well, and when *his* jacket vents popped a bit at the back it looked like "aha, I spend time on a stationary bike", not, like... whatever it looks like on me, which is: bad. He was however wearing a white shirt which wasn't even remotely HOPING anyone would button it to the collar, hence, open vee, with a gold cross.

He was a slim Anglo guy, hence, this whole Lewk looked... actually a bit odd on him. He did not have the sprouting chest hair, his cross was not heavy enough, etc, to keep up with his Inner West peers who had set the Lewk. He seemed to have exactly the standard demeanour for the job, so, more power to him (but less positive for me: what one WANTS in a letting agent is someone with no ambition to move up to sales).

2. Woman at the corner café near the flat that Mr Estate Agent showed me (attempt #3 to see said flat). She seemed to be in her mid to late 60s, with a knit top with a ruffly neckline. She was on good terms with the café owner, but so was *literally everyone else*, including, by attempt 3 to visit this flat, me. But most fascinatingly, she was on first name terms with a local pidgeon. The café owner would try to shoo him out of the shop, but she would keep feeding him scraps. At one point, he sat on her shoe. She told me she knew him by his missing toe. She proposed to bring bird seed next time.

3. The producer for the Packemin Productions run of Les Miserables in Parramatta, Neil Gooding, who came out front of the curtain at 7.35 (7.30 scheduled start) to say hi, everyone, we're supposed to start the show, but the Matildas have gone to a penalty shoot-out against France, and given all the phones that are out right now including mine (ie, his), well! He ended up giving relay commentary, based on what was fed up to him from the orchestra pit, for the benefit of people who didn't have good enough streaming and/or didn't understand soccer. The specific subtype of soccer commentary that is "for theatre nerds who want to know a, who is winning and b, how soon will the show start" is a rarely called-for niche.

A three-tier auditorium of theatre nerds, delayed 35 minutes for women's soccer. Truly unprecedented: not only would that not happen for most women's sport, it would neither happen for the socceroos (meh) nor any men's sport at which Australia excels (theatre nerds hold grudges back to high school, damnit).

3b. These neighbours of ours? Literally, if they were living in the signal box they're closer to us than most of the suburb is. I recognised the primary accused party: I've seen him around, and I've also seen people hop fences although I couldn't swear that I saw HIM hop a fence, I've seen plenty of people hop fences in this area. But I've seen plenty of people lurk, beg, and miscellaneously shout at the sky as well as jump fences. I couldn't say where I've seen Mr AJP, but I've definitely seen him.

It's just... honestly it's all a bit OOF. He and his co-accused, through their lawyer, deny being in the signal box that night. The state train corp apparently knew SOMEONE was living in the signal box. It's going to be... messy, I think, is the best description of what's going to play out here. Messy and perhaps not even reported on further, unless it provides good clickbait. I only found out about this through Transit Twitter, which is hardly the cutting edge of news and current affairs.

1. A well-dressed woman, probably in her sixties, with a small suitcase and wearing a felt cloche hat, seated on the train. She was reading a glossy book on textile history and every so often making an "ooh" noise which sounded EXACTLY like the Cat Activation Noise

2. Young couple at the bottom of the travelator in Ashfield mall, desperately trying to retrieve their groceries from where they have fallen out of an exploded paper bag and got tangled in people's feet and are at risk of getting tangled in the end of the escalator. They were trying to stuff a large paper bag worth of groceries into a small plastic bag that had obviously just been pulled out of a handbag. People were coming DOWN the travelator and bunching up around them.

I got some way UP the opposing travelator before realising I had a spare supermarket tote, and so caused more traffic chaos running (with my trolley) back DOWN the up travellator to give them my spare bag.

3. Young Asian couple crossing Eddy Avenue. The young chap was carrying a hard-shell pet backpack on his chest, the kind with a clear plastic front. Inside was a perch, but no parrot.

4. Enthusiastic woman in her late twenties or early thirties, working the checkout at Woollies, who first asked me what elderflower cordial is and what you do with it, and then what I was planning to do with a recipe book ("you can get everything on youtube now!"). I pointed out that looking for recipes online you have to know what KIND of recipe you want, but flicking through a recipe book you see things you've never heard of. She was fascinated by both this and the idea of elderflower and soda.

I would hazard a guess that she is a fine example of the good business sense that Woolworths have shown for the past many decades in pro-actively recruiting young people with learning disablities, offering traineeships that can be completed alongside schooling, and so on. We had a FINE time over-explaining things to each other for five minutes and then she gave me more than my just share of the current promo Disney stickers.

5. Man who was definitely partly off with the fairies, who passed Shiny and I on the stairs of Petersham station and first asked how we were going, and then actually ANSWERED our responding "not too bad and you" with how he was. Which was not great, he would have been better if he hadn't just had to spend "a hundred thousand" on changing his address for bail.

I don't think there's a fixed cost to that kind of bail variation application, and certainly it's not a hundred thou, but perhaps Legal Aid have a nominal contribution fee or something. He was having a tough day.

Some recent, some simply not remembered last time I made a list

1. Real estate agent unable to unlock the finnicky stairwell door lock in order to show the apartment to potential tenants. I could get the key half-turned. Took a big islander guy with commendable wrist strength to get it open.

2. Princess, a french bulldog wearing a red harness and a black and white scarf with red border. Princess made a beeline for our picnic blanket, because, according to her human (a polo shirt gay) she "loves French cheese". When forcibly removed from our vicinity, she lay on her belly with paws stretching toward the cheese.
Me: oh no, Princess! And we have ash brie, too!
Princess: *wrenches free*
Polo Shirt Gay, despairingly: she loves ash brie.
Polo Shirt gay assured us he never thought he'd be the type of guy who dresses up his dog. Reader, he was the type of guy who, if you met him, you would look around for a dressed-up dog.

3. Family of three South Asian women on the street in Campsie. Two (a mother and elder daughter, or older and younger sister, pair) of them in traditional dress. Not saris - but the kind of cropped top that goes under a sari, and swooshy floaty skirts, and a drapey scarf/stole thing. With them, a teenager in jeans and a boxy shirt, looking very unimpressed about whatever Occasion she'd been dragged into.

4. Coworker who appears every few days around desk partition brandishing mandarins from his tree. Sometimes he leaves them with no explanation on people's desks. Most recently, I was given a lemonadefruit.

5. Same coworker, in the middle of the working morning, sitting with a garbage bin between his feet, holding a sieve, and sieving the salt from salted nuts, which he then placed in a jar. (This is not the same coworker as the one who toasted nuts in the sandwich press.)

6. Child of seven or eight on a train who was reading the train network map and telling his probably-grandparent all about the plans for the metro expansion. This was the day after they had run the first test train under the harbour, so I asked the child if he knew about that. He did not, and was very bamboozled by the idea of driving a train UNDER the harbour.

I want to get in the habit of writing up occasional multi-paragraph reviews, as well as WAYRW posts with the ecclectic range of comments I put on goodreads. Plus for once I have a photograph that complements an e-book, for instagram purposes.

Kerry Greenwood: Death Before Wicket (Phryne Fisher #10)



This was a delightful romp, albeit one which had me madly cross-referencing historical USyd figures to see who was fictional and who wasn't. (And seething about the fact that the Hours of Juana the Mad are an actual book with known provenance, which was definitely never held - let alone lost - in Sydney.)

In points entirely typical of the Phryne Fisher books, you can expect parties, cocktails, side characters with a penchant for witty banter, extravagant costumes, and at least one (1) sex scene. This book sees Phryne going to Sydney to answer a call for help from two undergraduates, concerned that their colleague may be expelled. Along the way she gets entangled with practitioners of the occult, a notorious brothel madam, entirely too many professors, and assorted debauched poets. I particularly appreciated Christopher Brennan's accurate-to-type bit part appearance as a drunkard poet, A++ work there. A sub-plot involving two different wives and mothers pulled by circumstances into the sex trade is well handled, interesting, and a good supplement to the main theft/attempted murder plot.

There's something slightly odd about the central plot premise, which, without giving too much away, involves in part a rivalry between a professor of Egyptology and a professor of anthropology over the allocation of funding (archaeological research, or work with indigenous australians). The anthropologist is carefully characterised as someone who genuinely respects his indigenous hosts, and opposes mining on their sacred lands (nice contemporary reference there), which... is fair enough, given that the historically more likely situation would make unpleasant reading, and cosy crime relies on most characters being essentially likeable. The Egyptologist, though, is portrayed as particularly interested in Egypt because there he can pursue relationships with younger men, and... the gross colonialisms of that are not interrogated. There's a lot of deflecting going on, essentially.

In short, a good read, but not one that exhibits the best of Kerry Greenwood's ability to navigate historical diversity and the racial politics of 1920s Australia.

A friend - a small, fey man - and I were at the bar, buying last drinks. A large happy drunk man was "dancing" next to the bar, and by dancing we mean full-blown karaoke style, down on his knees singing and at some point putting his arse in the air and waggling it around.

Friend, quietly, to me: when did this become a gay bar?
Me: I... do not know.
Friend: Not that I'm complaining.
Me: *shrugs* Arses!

Friend commences ordering his drinks. Next thing I know, large hands are cupping my butt. I become somewhat confused, because the individual most likely to be placing large hands on my butt is in another country. I turn around, and Mr Arse Dancing is groping by butt.

Me: That's my butt!
Mr Arse Dancing: It is?
Me: That's my butt. (Moving my butt out of his reach)
Mr Arse Dancing: Is it?
Me: Yes. It is my personal property.
Mr Arse Dancing: Oh. Is looking ok?
Me: Yes. Looking is ok; touching is not.
Mr Arse Dancing: *makes a big show of examining my butt*
Me: I hope it is satisfactory.

Mr Arse Dancing steps back a little, and I insert myself between Friend and the bar, instructing him that he is not to leave yet, because my butt is under contest. Friend says of course, and seems a little surprised that I felt I had to specify this to him. I don't think to put Friend between me and Mr Arse Dancing, which perhaps would've been a good idea. Tiny he may be but he still occupies space. For some reason, perhaps boyed by drunk logic, I thought I had accurately asserted my position and Mr Arse Dancing would resign himself to looking.

Mr Arse Dancing waits until I'm ordering my drinks and resumes handling my butt. At this point the general manager, who may or may not have noticed, but is friends with Mr Arse Dancing, turns up and engages him in a strange homoerotic wrestle on the bartop.

What. Just what?

Girl: He's bisexual. But like, a cool bi guy.
Guy: Not like A***. Not one of those homophobic bisexuals.

GUESS WHO SAW GREAT BIG SEA LAST NIGHT? IN THEIR FIRST-EVER SYDNEY SHOW?

YES ME. Also kayloulee. And it was fucking amazing.

( Here is a long ramble! )

TL;DR I had a fantastic time and we sang and danced and it was fantastic.