Things women deal with (NaBloPoMo day 5)

Tonight I’m once again so exhausted that I don’t know how I’m going to write my daily post. It’s nearly 9 PM, I’ve been working on a few different posts for hours, and still I have nothing ready to publish. My brain is pretty much fried. I had an unusually busy morning and my energy level never recovered after I got home at 2 PM. I thought I would have plenty of time to rest and recuperate before heading to the gym at 8 PM, but the downtime didn’t have the desired effect. I’ll get back to boot camp tomorrow night. Funny enough, sitting here typing on my laptop seems just as difficult as the weight training I missed. I don’t want to rehash my post from two days ago, but I do want to be transparent about how much more challenging NaBloPoMo is for me now than it has been in years past. I’m still going to see if I can complete it!

In order to make this post slightly more interesting I’ll tell you about an incident that happened to me last night. I was in my car on my way from boot camp to the grocery store because I had a craving for cereal. Not the best thing to eat after a workout, but probably not the worst either. I was waiting at a red light in one of two left turn lanes and digging around for something in my purse. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the car in the other left turn lane inching forward so that their passenger side window was aligned with my driver side window. I had a gut feeling that whoever was in the car was being a weirdo so I deliberately didn’t look in the other car’s direction. I wanted no part in any shenanigans. Under normal circumstances both cars would have gone on their way without any interaction when the light turned green, but unfortunately for the state of our society these days that’s not how this story ends. Suddenly the person in the car next to me honked their horn. I finally glanced in that direction to see what the ruckus was all about, and I saw a male driver smiling broadly at me. He leaned as far as he could towards my driver’s side window and shouted, “Smile!” He also pointed at the corners of his lips, which were still upturned in a Joker-like grin, in case I wasn’t familiar with the facial expression he was demanding from me. Yes, you read that right. Some man decided to use his car horn (generally employed to indicate automotive distress) to inform a random woman in a separate car that she needed to look happy for his benefit. In what universe is that acceptable? And yet, this is a situation that women face on a daily basis. It’s absolutely ridiculous. In that moment, tired and sweaty, I had never been less inclined to comply with a man’s request. All this dude got was an exasperated eye roll and my middle finger extended in his direction before the light turned green and our brief encounter was over. I wish I could have given him a piece of my mind along with flipping the bird, but I didn’t get the opportunity. So if you’re of the male persuasion and happen to be reading this post, please think about how you interact with women to make sure you fall into the same category as this jerk!