Bus Adventures and Frights

One of the joys of being a college student for me is taking the bus.  Being a student means I get a free bus pass so I park me car, for free, at the Uptown bus lot, show by UNM ID to the driver, and I get a ride to school.  It's pretty darned convenient but not without it's adventures and, at times, it's frightening moments.

I haven't taken the bus since I was last at UNM which was about, what, two years ago or so?  Something like that.  So my first day, last Monday, I caught my bus, made it to my classes, and then ran to bus stop to catch the bus back to my car.  Now I take the Rapid Ride, there's a Red line and a Green line that run past UNM and I take the Red line.  Somehow, I managed to confuse myself and I thought the Green line was the bus I wanted and literally ran to catch the bus and made it.  Yay!  Well, until we drove past Louisiana and I was like, um, wait a second, shouldn't you have turned there?  Yeah, my brain was not working correctly that day.  It took me a second to remind myself that, oh yeah, the Red line runs both east and west, not just west.  Needless to say, I felt incredibly stupid as I rode the Green line bus all the way up to Central and Tramway and then back down to Central and Louisiana where I was able to catch the next Red line bus.  That was my first bus adventure.

Other than that first day, most of my bus rides have been fairly unadventurous.  Most of my classes start at 11am and I'm done by around 2 or so.  However, since I dropped my Astronomy class which I would have driven to since it wasn't at UNM and instead decided to take Acting II, I now have three days in my 4 day school week that I am on campus until after 6.  And it seems to be after 6 that riding the bus gets interesting and a little scary.

My first notion of this came this past Thursday.  I'm taking a Science Fiction in Film class that I'm really excited about, but since we actually watch films in class, it goes from 5:30 to 9:00 pm which is the latest class I have ever taken in my college years.  I was expecting the class to go the full time since it only meets on Thursdays, but my professor was evidently stuck in England.  I wish seriously wish that would happen to me!  So we were handed a syllabus, wrote our names on a sheet of paper for attendance, and were sent on our merry ways just before 6.  I got over to the bus stop and thankfully the bus got there almost immediately.  Now when I'm on the bus, I always set my bag on the seat next to me so that no one can sit by me and I put my headphones in so people can't talk to me.  That night, I didn't put my headphones in because I was too distracted looking over the syllabus and checking out what movies we were going to be watching.

As I was reading a couple of guys came over and sat across from me.  One of them seemed to be either drunk or not all there because he was slurring his speech, talking loudly, and just acting weird.  At the next stop, where they were evidently getting off, he stood up, suddenly leaned over me and started telling me how beautiful I was and would I shake his hand, etc.  And I just shook my head and smiled awkwardly till his friends pulled him off the bus.  It was more of an awkward encounter than creepy, but it gave me a taste of what it was going to be like riding the bus at a later time.

My second encounter was last night.  My acting class goes till almost 7, so by the time we left it was dark and snowing.  Thankfully the bus stop is right by the building where class is, so it wasn't a long walk over, but when I got there, I was the only female around and there were about 5 or 6 guys standing around who I'm guessing were homeless.  As I stood under the shelter waiting for the bus, I had a slightly older guy walk up with his bike and just start talking to me.  The attention he paid to me made me nervous so I gave him short answers to his questions about my favorite season and such while still trying to be polite.  Several minutes later another guy, obviously homeless, walked up and started talking to me as well.  This guy, however, had no sense of personal space and got right up in my face.  At that point, I started to panic because under the shelter with both guys right by me, I was essentially back into a corner.  The bus stop is right in front of Frontier, but I discovered a while back that they do not like people waiting for the bus inside the restaurant which I guess is fairly reasonable.  Since I couldn't go inside, I pulled my phone, said I was getting a call and half ran from the shelter over to the building itself by the windows and called my parents to ask them to pick me up.  As it turned out, they had just gotten home and rather than having them drive all the way over to UNM, I decided to just stay by the building in full sight of people until the bus arrived.

When it did arrive, I was a nervous wreck and I practically ran onto the bus and made sure I sat behind the bus driver and set my backpack on the seat next to me.  Unfortunately it was a longer bench so it could seat up to three people and the first guy who had started talking to me at the bus stop ended up sitting next to me.  By the time he had gotten on, I had managed to get my earbuds in and turned on my music which succeeded in partially calming me down.  Seriously, Stoic's Ship from the How to Train Your Dragon 2 soundtrack is an amazingly beautiful song and always helps relax me for some reason.  My neighbor, however, unable to get the message that I wanted to be left alone, started asking me about what music I liked and had I heard this song or heard of this artist, etc.  I tried to mostly ignore him and just smiled and shook my head a lot.  I have this thing where I really struggle to be mean to strangers, even when they're being really creepy which is probably not a good thing exactly.  I really need to stop smiling when I'm nervous.  In any case, it culminated with him asking if I wanted his phone number so we could go out for coffee sometime at which point I said no and put both earbuds back in.  Thankfully he didn't say anything to me for the rest of the trip and got off without even acknowledging me for which I was incredibly grateful.  The rest of the ride to the station was uneventful and I made it to my car safely.

One of the things I noticed with these two encounters is that I'm not always as careful as I should be in noticing my surroundings and making sure I'm in a safe location.  I generally have this mindset that no one's going to want to kidnap or attack the fat, unattractive young woman hanging out by herself on Central, they're going to go for the pretty, skinny girls.  But as I have once again discovered, the only men I seem able to attract are the creepers, drunks, and older men who don't give a care what a girl looks like as long as she is female.  Lucky me. >.<  I remember thinking when I used to take the bus that I should get a fake boyfriend to ride the bus with me and protect me from the creepers I would see.  I should seriously do that.  Anyone interested?  I can't pay you with money, but I'll cook something for you!  JK  Naw, I figure if any guy actually tried something, I'll just tackle him and sit on him while I call police, that should work.  But in all seriousness, the good thing, I guess, is that now I know and I can be sure to be more careful and hopefully I won't have any more encounters for the rest of the semester!