Are you on the Bus?

I am fortunate enough to enjoy a completely free transit system in my town. There is no parking on campus so we all save hundreds of dollars a year being able to ride the bus to and fro. I am absolutely not complaining about the gratuitous transportation provided by the good people of Chapel Hill today. Absolutely not. Indeed, today I'm complaining about the good people of Chapel Hill.

As someone who took buses around Chicago for four years, I am freaked out when I ride the buses here. In Chicago, if I saw the same man every day on the way to and back from work, I would probably consider him to be stalking me. But my little bus route has few enough riders that I actually notice when new people are on the bus. Not only that, but I can remember things about the people I see every day.

There's the girl with the bag I really like. Sometimes I hate my bag so much that I want to ask her to trade with me. There's the guy that dresses well and smells awful. There are the girls with perfectly straight, blond hair-- I have no idea how anyone keeps their hair so smooth in this humidity. There's the girl who is always sucking face with some guy and looking at me as if I should be jealous. I'm not jealous, lady... no disgusting tongue maneuver you perform can make me wish I were you. I can out-maneuver you any day of the week, honey.

Then there is this guy on the bus that I tried to ask out last year. He had long black hair, piercings, fingerless leather gloves, and always wore classic rock t-shirts. One day he and I both wore a Beatles shirt, so I got on and sat next to him, then tried to talk about how funny it was that we were both wearing a Beatles shirt. It got awkward real quick (as you may have suspected). Later in the year, he cut his hair and looked respectable and I lost all interest (as you may have suspected).

I have not yet lost interest in cornering strange men on the bus and attempting to make them love me. It's a fun game. Today I happened to be sitting next to a marginally attractive man and quickly noticed an unpleasant odor emanating from an unidentifiable direction. It definitely wasn't Attractive Man. I became increasingly paranoid that he might think I smelled like baby poop-- I wanted to turn to him and say, "Sir, you should know that I just stepped out of the shower 20 minutes ago and thus have not had the opportunity to generate the nostril profanity we now experience." But that would have been even more awkward than the sometimes-goth boy incident.

Suddenly I located the origin of the scent: BAD SMELLING GUY was sitting right in front of us. He became impossible to ignore. Why was BSG on the bus at this unusual time? What have I done to evoke this inopportune fortune? Well, I've done a lot of bad things in my life, so I can't really claim I don't deserve to sit next to an odoriferous person or two... but I digress. The smell continued until BSG got off the bus at the stop before mine.

People, I beg you. Please don't go on the bus if you haven't showered in weeks. Just walk home from work-- it's not like a little sweat will make you stink worse than you already do. It makes it really hard for me to terrorize good-looking men with my flirtations when an ambiguous odor shakes my deluded self-confidence.