the daily snivel

  While on the way home...

While bicycling home just a few minutes ago, I was leaving the University of Ottawa Community Legal Clinic after a particularly tiresome and frustrating day. I'd just managed to pack up my things and begin heading home, turned onto Laurier Avenue and cycled up to the intersection at King Edward, and what do you think happened next?

From a shiny red sportscar in the intersection came voices.

"Hey, you fat bicyclist!"

"Fuck you, you fucking fat bicyclist!"

"Lose some weight!"

"Get off that bicycle, you're too fat!!"

"Go on a diet!"

It goes without saying that people like that just want a reaction, or at least want to know they can hurt you (which they did), and all I could do was just start riding once the light turned green and turn a deaf ear to it, trying to keep some dignity while people standing at the corner looked on at me and the guys in the car. A more self-assured person would have yelled back, maybe pointing out the stupidity of telling someone on a bicycle to lose some weight but not by bicycling. And maybe if it hadn't been one of those trying weeks for me, I could look at all the times I've gone to the gym and cut out things like french fries from my diet and point to the silly "Special K" pedometer that shows I walked over 17,000 steps (nine miles) on a single day when I wore it for a test, and finally the fact that when I get on the scale it is showing that I'm losing weight.

But anyway, that's not the way I'm thinking tonight. I just feel fat and ugly.