I usually walk everywhere with my headphones on, but I had them in my bag and I was reading a book on my phone instead (I do that when the foot traffic is light). A young Latina was coming down the street as I was coming up the avenue, and when she got to the corner a few paces ahead of me, she turned to walk in the direction I was going. We were traveling at the same speed, but since she was like ten paces ahead and it’s bright outside in the middle of the day, I didn’t feel the need to fall back or slow down to give her more space. At night, I try not to walk too close behind women just so they don’t feel like I’m any sort of threat.
We got to a corner and this dude standing outside of the bodega was like, “Slow down mama where you goin? You don’t have to work today, you can stop and speak.”
She didn’t break her stride. “I’m going to the gym.” The Walk sign was on, so I didn’t break mine either.
A block later, a young guy was coming toward us on the sidewalk riding his bike.
“What’s good shorty?”
She didn’t respond.
“Well you was lookin, you can say something, stuck up bitch.”
We kept walking.
In the middle of the next block, an older man was walking toward us and he put on a friendly smile and said, “Smile young lady, it’s a beautiful day.”
I don’t know if she smiled, but we kept walking. She went into the gym and I kept on toward where I was going thinking about how that was just five minutes of her day. How many other blocks of five minutes are just like that?
Only one of them was truly aggressive. The other two guys seemed nice enough and it felt more like a pleasant compliment. It felt like the kind of thing a guy says who argues with women online about catcalling. “We’re not all bad guys. We can’t even compliment women? We can’t even say something nice?”
No. You really can’t. I was annoyed in that five minutes and I just happened to be walking behind her with no headphones on. Can you imagine those five minutes over and over every day of your life? Nobody wants to be spoken to by strangers day in and day out forever regardless of what they’re saying.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
Got it, my dudes?
The two guys who weren’t aggressive weren’t even complimenting her. The first was suggesting that she do something he wanted her to do, with no reason why she might given save a strange assumption that she didn’t have anywhere to be. The second just flat-out ordered her to do something he wanted her to do, and the fact that he did so in a pleasant tone of voice is irrelevant. These are not compliments. These are instances of harassment.
im in physical pain every day because finnish tumblr users have the weirdest urls ever but nobody knows it because the urls are in finnish
seriously its shit like moomin-rectal-prolapse, jesus-spanker, foreskin-cum-burrito, turbo-bream-orgy and satan’s-titty-slurper and so on. and im not exaggerating at all. and this is not small minority among finnish tumblr blogs, its more like the standard to have urls like these. and none of you non-finnish-speakers have seen this mess because its written in finnish
i just spent a couple minutes going thru finnish tumblr tags. here’s a short list of some of my faves
roughly “chaotically fertilized” (or maybe inseminated? sikin sokin doesn’t really have a direct translation but it’s kinda like, willy nilly, disorganized, chaotic… like things can be “sikin sokin” (messy, disorganized, chaotic) on ur desk or in a drawer)
pourtmanteau of carousel (karuselli) and celery (selleri)
the lord’s vagina (vittu technically means like. the whole of the genitalia associated w vaginas not just the vagina, and is a curse word that has a denotion that boils down to abt the same as c*nt when used to refer to genitals, but with the severity/social acceptance level/usage of “fuck.” if you can put “fuck” there you can put “vittu” there. herra/the lord means specifically The Lord in the religious sense here)
foreplayground
satan’s pineapple
pourtmanteau of mental illness (mielisairaus) and dinosaur (dinosaurus)
extreme diarrhea
dick mountain
sex toy box
self-beer-er, roughly, but it’s a pun/joke on flasher (itsensäpaljastaja, lit self exposer) and beer (kalja)
I’m adding a few as well because I’ve loved these things since I joined Tumblr.
A portmanteau of umbilical cord and tightrope walker = umbilical cord walker.
The new shit house (outhouse), written in the style of 1500s.
The never-ending [state of being] fucking annoyed. Please refer to the entry “herranvittu” for the use of vittu.
I-won’t-give-up-beer.
Radical fuck satan.
Repe Sorsa is the Finnish name of Daffy Duck, so rebel-duck is not far off.
my translation skills might not be the best but let me add some:
onion of modesty
seashell fetish
broccoli worm
blueberry hater
gay drumming
brutal banana
ok first you need to know that the word “bead” is the same as “pearl” in finnish. so this could be pourtmanteau of analbeads and seashell, or anal pearl seashell.
I’ll probably have to change my tumblr name to fit in with the other finnish users – my username is way too normal
look man im a native english speaker and i’ve been mispronouncing a crap ton of words because i never looked up the pronunciation for any of them but if you make fun of how a foreigner pronounces an english word either because of their accent or having never heard that word before i will fucking fight you because english has shitty pronunciation rules and none of them make sense fuck off
This raccoon lives in the crawlspace under my house and she comes to chill on the deck every night around dusk like this is her house and I’m the one illegally squatting in her attic.
I need to let you all know that I’ve changed my Privacy Policy. I will no longer keep any of my thoughts private. I will now yell every single thought I have out loud at the top of my lungs. There is no way to decline my terms and conditions. I am going to be yelling at the top of my lungs. There is nothing you can do to stop me.
So I was planning on barbecuing some chicken burgers for supper this evening, but the tank ran out of propane while I was burning the shmutz off of the grille.
No big deal, I thought: I’m out of propane and I don’t have a car, but there’s a service station that does tank exchanges just a couple of blocks away. I’ll load the empty tank into a wheeled cart, drag it down to the service station, swap it for a full one, drag the new tank back – problem solved.
Additional problem the first: when I get to the service station, the attendant informs me that scarcely ten minutes before I got there, some guy with like fifteen empty tanks in the back of his truck had wheeled up and totally cleaned them out – they had no full tanks to give me.
Okay, I thought, I can deal with this: there’s another service station three blocks further on. What was meant to be a four-block round trip is now a ten-block round trip, but hey, I can use the exercise.
I haul myself down to the other service station, swap out the tank, and set off for home.
Additional problem the second: as I’m on my way back, the sky opens up in a massive thunderstorm. Normally this would just mean I get wet, were it not for…
Additional problem the third: the route I’ve chosen involves briefly crossing an open field – which is exactly where I happen to be when the storm hits.
So now there’s lightning coming down everywhere, and I’m standing out in the open, soaking wet, holding onto a metal canister full of explosive gas.
I just wanted some chicken burgers.
this hero’s journey demands resolution
I’m in the process of barbecuing those burgers as we speak. I figure if I’ve survived this far I might as well go for broke!
BURGER OBTAINED
how tasty was it??
Meat was a little overcooked, though I think I did fairly well given that the sun had set by the time I got back and I ended up barbecuing in the dark.
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