On Personal Space

I want to write like Dawn Meehan. She wrote an amazing eBay description that went viral many years ago. It was about what it’s like to grocery shop with six kids, and how she ended up with Pokemon cards in her cart.

She’s recently picked up blogging again, and I love to read her work. She makes me laugh. She sees the humor in every situation, and a lot of her humor is at her own expense. Embarrassing moments make great writing, when done right. She gets really fired up about a lot of things, like why she hasn’t found a church to attend in Florida, or a certain bird that wakes her up in the middle of the night, or what it’s like to be an Uber driver. I find her wildly entertaining, and I love her voice more than probably any other blogger I’ve followed.

I had this memory pop up on Facebook yesterday:

So many of my favorite things I’ve written have been rants.

Like this one about the awful massage I had.

Or this one about the grocery carts.

Or this one about working at Blockbuster.

I’ve always felt like if my best writing comes from ranting, then maybe it said something bad about me. I've been accused of being a negative and cynical and sarcastic person many times in my life, and that's not the legacy I've wanted to leave. So I have worked on silencing that voice. I unleashed it a couple of years ago in writing 50,000 words about all of my past roommates. But none of that writing has ever seen the light of day, because, well, they’re all real people, and not all real flattering stories (there are some; I’ve had a lot of great roommates!).

Here’s the thing though, I don’t ever leave Dawn Meehan’s blog feeling worse. She is sarcastic and cynical, and I enjoy her writing immensely. It doesn’t darken or ruin my day. It does the opposite.

And so in an effort to write regularly this month, I want to hone in on those moments where I get annoyed or bugged. The one that comes to mind most immediately is in regard to personal space.

I feel like maybe this is just an American problem, but I really don’t understand the encroaching of personal space. Let me explain.

I donate plasma about twice per week. After you go through the screening, you walk through a door where you sit in a chair to wait to get to a donation bed. It’s in a sort of U-shape setup. There are maybe 3-4 chairs on one end, 3-4 on the other, and probably about 7-8 on the long side connecting those ends. Here's my drawing:

I feel that when there are many chairs available, and several people are in the area, it’s possible (and dare I say it, NECESSARY) to leave one to two chairs between each other.

So why in the devil would this lady come and sit in the chair right next to me? 

Listen, lady. We had a pattern going.

One guy sat on the short side. Another guy sat on the long side. I sat four chairs down from him. That left the other short side completely empty. Four chairs at her disposal, with four additional in between me and the other dude, where she could’ve sat with space between us all.

But no.

She sat next to me.

We aren’t talking like one seat away from me.

No.

Right next to me.

I mean, I might be able to understand it if I tried real hard. Maybe she was just absolutely drawn to my beauty in my oversized sweater and staticky hair. Maybe I smelled extra, inexplicably fabulous. Maybe the other men in the seating area were frightful to her.

I try to be an understanding person. But some things I just don’t get.

At Disneyland once, we had a group of four or five teenage boys in line behind us at Space Mountain. They were typical obnoxious teenagers, either lacking self-awareness or totally careless (or both). The one kept bumping in to me during his dramatic retellings. He hit me with his elbow once or twice. He stepped his heel back onto my shoe. I took deep breaths and made faces of intent to kill at my then-boyfriend. Finally, I’d had it. I stepped into my teacher shoes, turned around, looked at the kid, and said, “Can you just, PLEASE, give me some space?!”

His response was one of total surprise: “OK, geez.”

Kid, the fact that you didn’t realize the cumulative effect of all of your gestures and stepping and elbowing just confirmed why I don’t teach junior high anymore. Bloody hell. Get a damn clue.

The same goes for anyone who’s all up in your business in any line.

Like in line at TSA? Those people who are so excited to get patted down by a rubber gloved stranger that they bump your heel with their roller suitcase? Look dude, the gov ain’t gon' go any faster for you because you scooted up three inches. Back up. Back. Up.

Y’all, I just don’t get where these people come from. Often times it’s a cultural thing. Like if you’re out of the country (read: China), and they literally don’t have the space for you to even have a personal bubble, then fine. But we’re not in China. We got wide open spaces over here.

I don't think there's a solution, but I feel like we would have on if we could fart on command. Those who are all up in my business would just have to suffer the wrath of my bowels. Some have suggested feigned coughing fits. Unfortunately, I’m not an actress. Just a really irritable 30-something who wants everyone to get the heck away from me.