Kyla gets assaulted

Tonight I'm staying in. My roommates and I desperate for food, but short on groceries. We're searching for recipes that require the three ingredients we have: butter, sugar and flour. But we're pretty flexible-- it can be brown OR white sugar, because we have both. Looks like we're having shortbread. We found an easy bake oven recipe, so we're going to try that in a real oven. We'll just halve the temperature. Sally's in the kitchen right now, mixing ingredients. She'll make a great wife someday. I'm sitting on the couch, dictating the recipe to her and looking up measurement conversions. I knew fractions would come back to haunt me someday.

You're probably starting to get jealous of my crazy life, but just know it's not all fun and games. In fact, just last weekend, while on the tube, I was viciously, verbally attacked by the threatening words of a crazy man.

It all started out innocently enough. A friend from home, we'll call him N. Brock...no wait, that's too obvious... Nolan B., and I were heading to a market in Notting Hill. I needed a German chicken burger, and he needed a carton of blueberries. Portobello Road is the only place in the world with both. My roommate was with us, as well. The three of us found our seats in an otherwise empty carriage. A man of African (what is the proper term here? can't really use African American...) decent got on, too He had his phone up to his ear, and it was blaring reggae, much like a boom box. This guy was straight thuggin'. As he passed, I looked up at the him-- a natural reaction when someone walks by you dancing to their phone/boombox. No big deal, right? Wrong.

I have always heard you're not supposed to make eye contact with strangers on the tube. I now know that's not a myth. A few stops later, as the carriage filled up with other passengers, the man got up and walked over towards me. I was sitting by the door and assumed he was just waiting to get off. Wrong again. He had come to yell at me. It went something like this:

"You're UGLY! You've got an UGLY FACE! I'm going to SMACK it and BREAK it. And your boyfriend's (Nolan) ugly, too. Your face is UGLY. "

This goes on for a few minutes and I was, maybe for the first time in my life, speechless. He screams in my face, others look, and then he stops. I turn to Nolan and say,"Anyway..." and try to think of a story to tell him to reduce the awkwardness.

The guy starts again. Same sorta thing, only he ends it this time by saying, "I'm joking," and looks out the window. Then he turns back towards me and says, "But I don't like the look you gave me. I might be ugly, but you are too! You look at me like you're so much better than me. You're no better than me. You're UGLY and I'm going to hit you and your boyfriend's faces."

At this point I look at a man across the aisle, who does the international symbol for crazy (pazzo, loco, etc.)-- the finger spin at the side of the head.

And maybe I should mention that earlier, before screamfest began, I watched the guy pick up his Red Bull can and attempt to chuck it out the door. Unfortunately, he missed and it bounced off the window, back into his lap. He picked it up again and heaved it out the door, this time, successfully. I watched the whole thing because it was, for lack of a better word, awesome. This guy didn't give a darn. He didn't respect authority. He had better things to worry about-- like his public jam session.

So I might have made eye contact there, too. But if he would looked a little closer he would have seen revenrence in my eyes-- I've always aspired to be a rebel, but I think anyone who knows me knows how far from that I am. In 4th grade, I told on myself because I went into the boys' bathroom on a dare. I lost sleep over it the night before I confessed. I got myself so psyched up for the imminent punishment that I was actually a little disappointed my teacher didn't cserve some up. She didn't even care-- she didn't try to scold me or tell me I had misbehaved -- she actually thanked me and COMMENDED me for being honest.

Anyway, this guy was cool in my book. But he didn't know I felt like that. He finally finished ranting at me, and everyone on the tube reassured me that I needn't be embarrassed, he was obviously crazy. Later Nolan and I were talking.

"All I could think was, 'I hope Nolan can take him,'" I said, "because I was pretty sure he was going to hit us."

"Oh I could. I'm trained to kill," Nolan responded. "But I was going to make sure he knew I wasn't your boyfriend, so it would never have gotten that far." Thanks, buddy.

And then, on the way home, Nolan was trying to get me to do a pull up on a hand bar in the tube.

"No. I don't want to make a scene on here," I responded.

"YOU don't want to make scene on the tube? Hmmm..."

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