Bad Day Today

It didn’t start off as one, of course.  There was no major catastrophe, no string of problems.  The weather was nice.  For the first time in a while I was working a full week instead of having to lose pay to take some bullshit class.  All in all, it seemed like a pleasant sort of day.

I work as a land surveyor.  Part of my job is to knock on the door to let people know we were there and we’d be doing a survey of their property.  On the second job, a young girl answered.  She was probably late teens, maybe as late as her twenties.  She was cute, and she smiled at me.  She seemed nice enough, she was polite and let us go about our job with no fuss.  I even started to think she might have found me a little attractive.  You’d think I would have learned by now.

When she answered the door, she was startled, caught off guard.  Which is a fairly normal reaction.  Few people, I’ve discovered, actually know what a property survey is.  So I didn’t think anything of it.  It was later, though, that I came back to reality.  At that point she knew we were there and that we would be around the property.  I told her this myself.  She came out later on in the job, leaving to go somewhere.  She happened to walk by me, and naturally, I glanced her way.  She froze.  One look from me and she froze like a rabbit.  She smiled a moment later, but by then it was too late.  I knew what emotion I stirred in her.  Fear.  Like everyone, she was afraid of me.  And once again I got a reminder of why I come to this place, why I dream of being someone attractive and loved.  Because there is no place for the real me, nowhere I belong.  People will forever fear me.

There are, ultimately, two basic reactions to me, and they depend on the gender of the person.  Woman adopt a classic “hare defense”.  They freeze.  They smile, they try to be non-threatening or aggressive so as not to provoke an attack in defense of a perceived threat.  While at the same time they try not to run, because predators chase things that run.  So they try to appear harmless but not defenseless.  Men, on the other hand, adopt a “pufferfish” style of defense.  When a pufferfish is scared, it inflates its body in order to appear bigger and more dangerous in the hopes of frightening off its attacker.  So when a man is scared, especially when they are scared by someone who, like me, doesn’t look like something they should be scared of, they immediately become aggressive.  Their egos puff up and they start to tell themselves how they are big and bad, and to prove it they are going to start “kicking sand” at that which scares them.  Like children, poking a stick between the bars of a cage to prove they are tougher than the animal within.

In the end, though, the result is the same.  I am hated and feared, not because anything I’ve done, but simply because that is what people see when they look at me. 

Just one of life’s little reminders that monsters don’t get happy endings.