Lack of oxygen

The rain finally stopped, you'll be happy to know, and the sun came out, and every pollen bearing form of plant life decided this was the moment to put it out there. So a pleasant trip to the park became a hellish journey into nasal torture and carbon dioxide build up in the blood stream from lack of the ability to exhaust the bad air and replace it with the good air.

Which may explain why earlier in the day I found myself feeling bitter, for no particular immediate reason, about the fascism of enforced happiness. All those occasions when you are compelled at the risk of mass scorning, even from your friends, to be happy and follow some preordained script: it will happen on this day at this time, and you will do this and that, and you will eat these exact same items, and engage in these rituals, the same as everybody else, with no deviation allowed. This seems to happen all the time in America. Every month there is some damned occasion or another when you are compelled to have fun and be happy and eat some dead animal or wear some stupid mandatory clothing or at the very least shop and express false sentiments.

Before all this came to mind, I was clumping through the Safeway parking lot and became aware of the fact that a man was very patiently waiting for me to move on by so he could pull into the parking space I was traversing. I wondered what would have happened if I had been wearing high heels and a tight skirt, was decorated with makeup and bedecked with a coif? Would I have run on tippy-toes to get out of the way, or just waved him on knowing how long it would take to make the trip. Would he have been just as nice to me or even nicer somehow? Do men appreciate the appearance of the woman who is overtly feminine for its own sake, or are they more responding to the fact that this woman wants to be overtly feminine? Like, she's my kind of woman because she has bouffant hair, or she's my kind of woman because she likes to have bouffant hair knowing that it makes her desirable to other people who like bouffant hair. And that said, is there more to being overtly feminine than wanting to give visual pleasure to men and the men-like?

And then I went on to have a bagel with cream cheese and tomato for lunch and forgot about all of it.