How am I? Do you really want to know?

So I survived a nine-day stint with the swine flu. The bus on the way to pharmacy was traumatic. School kids making fun of me, so taxed I wanted to punch one of them in the face. An especially fat one bragging about how he would go into the city and cough on people to make them think they were being infected. I survived the bus ride temper intact and got a bottle of Codeine cough syrup for my troubles.

When children are tormenting you it sucks because you are essentially powerless. What are you going to do? Fight an 11 year-old? No, you just have to take it. Because if you start a fight with a child you'll always lose. Sean told me a story about his friend who was being tormented by some kid on her block. She fought back and punched him in the face. When he instantly started crying she realized that this teen must be much younger than he looked. Instead of the seventeen year-old she'd guessed him to be turns out he was thirteen. His mother started freaking out at her and she had to avoid the second half of her block for fear of an angry mama out to kick her ass.

The only way to win a fight with a kid is to go directly to the mother which I used to do when I was 18 and living on my own for the very first time. I lived on an especially dicey block in Columbia, MO. These little kids would bug the shit out me, asking me if I was in porn, asking me if I was a slut and fucking my male roommate, asking me if I was a witch (I had dyed black hair and my roommate was goth) and all sorts of shit. I appealed to their mother and together we'd fuck with her son, I'd threaten to tell on him and she'd yell out "are you bothering our nice neighbor again?" and psyche him out. Eventually the porn inquiries stopped which is nice because having a ten year old ask you if your pussy is in any magazine is pretty goddamn disturbing.

But sometimes you have no power as to whether you win or lose. When you are riding your bike on Hewes Street in pink hot pants in the dead of summer and four kids start pelting you with vegetable matter it's hard not to talk some shit. But unfortunately calling the kids little assholes increases their wrath and suddenly, fuck you get hit in the ribs with what seems to be a peeled potato. One vicious bruise later I learned that giving up and running away is pretty much the only option. Kids are fucking scary.