The wet sneeze and that one guy on the bus...

Influenced by a particular episode of M*A*S*H, I'm sitting here drinking whiskey in a coffee mug. I suppose it makes me feel less degenerate. To compensate for this I am listening to Schubert's 5th symphony. It is the piece I am currently studying for my conducting lessons.

I live about 8 miles south of campus so I have found public transportation to be quite convenient. I use the city bus which probably caters to a more diverse pool of people, as opposed to the campus bus. I would say on any particular day the make-up of the bus is 85% students and 15% city residents. One particular gentleman has caught my attention.

He looks to be single and in his mid 40's. He doesn't strike me as a mean or unkind man, but sometimes as an inappropriate man. This isn't relevant to the current anecdote, but I have seen him get on the bus when extremely intoxicated.

As in any college town, there are a fair amount of attractive people. We'll use women as the objects in this case because it's quite clear that this gentleman isn't gay. Girls come on and off the bus all the time, and he stares them down and looks at them generally within the standard window of time before the girl gets uncomfortable. However, when a girl with a low-cut shirt gets on the bus, all the rules of public decorum are simply ignored by this man. He literally drops his jaw about half an inch and just stares right at the girl's chest. The girl obviously notices this and glances him off. He'll look away, regain his composure, and then just go back to staring. The girl then usually goes on the defensive after the initial stand-off and proceeds to look in every direction but that of where this man is sitting. She knows he's just gawking at him, but being conflict-averse, she just ignores it, while still internalizing how it makes her feel, for the remainder of the bus ride.

I don't think this man is dangerously aggressive in his stares, but certainly creepily aggressive. Don't get me wrong, I don't necessarily disagree with the girl's choice of non-action. If she'd rather feel just mildly uncomfortable for a few minutes instead of risking an altercation with an unknown creepy man that's more than acceptable to me. I wonder, though, if I should say something...I'm just sitting there watching this all go down from a distance. Is it my responsibility to say anything to this man in the defense (though she may not technically need it) of the woman? If I say something to him will it likely cause him to think twice about staring in the future as someone has publicly called him out? What goes on in my head is that I don't want this girl feeling needlessly uncomfortable at the expense of this man. She should be free to travel without sexual and emotional stress. Next time this goes down I'll certainly think hard about saying something.

Last thing. I understand people not wanting to sneeze in public. It's not particularly sightly. But if you're going to choose the method of suppressing your sneeze in your nasal cavity in order to save your hand, make sure that it's not a wet sneeze...Sure you saved your hand, but you just infected the entire QWERTY keyboard you were using.