DEPENDENCY

I am fully addicted to my iPod. There is no way around that fact. It is the simple truth of the matter. Granted, like the paranoid freak who really does have people out to kill him, I have very good reasons for my addiction. Well, one very good reason; I live in China.

For reasons beyond my control, I have spent the last two weeks without my iPod and I will be remedying that situation as soon as humanly possible. However, at current I am sans iPod.

Fuck, it’s brutal.

The constant invasion of China into my personal space is making me batty. Actually, it’s driven me into shut-in mode. I refuse to leave my apartment unless I have to now. What my iPod has been doing for me until now has been to provide a bubble of ignorance. The men I know who stare at me and talk about me are no longer drowned out by music of my choice that I control. I am now fully aware of their dialogue and it is the most irritating, base, chauvinist commentary about my physical self and how all foreign women fall within the stereotype applicable to me.

There are men who clearly think that I am little more than a blow up doll to be their dumpster. There are men who cut me down to impress their girlfriends. There are men who crack a multitude of jokes at my expense to impress the masses. Then there are the men who realize I speak Chinese halfway through their truly base conversation and then call me the equivalent of a “frigid bitch” because I won’t then engage in a dialogue with them. There are the women who giggle and compare themselves with my height to marvel and how big I am. There are the grandmothers who insist their grandchildren interact with the circus freak. There are the punk teenagers who try to work up the nerve to talk to me but then settle for being forced to merely rub (their genitals) by me as they pass through the tighter of the two squeezes of space on the bus or in the shop.

It is fully grating. It is fully irritating and offensive. It is everything New York purports to be but isn’t. I’ve never had to have such a thick skin in all my life. And, the truth is, I’ve never been a bigger bitch.

With my iPod, I missed the set up. I missed the dialogue explaining what was going on. Before, I was merely being jostled or pointed at. Now, I am forced to listen in painstaking detail, to why. I am forced to listen to the small minds and the prejudice and, worst of all, the lack of education. I am forced to hear grown men discuss in great detail how the “little girl” body is far more appealing than my fully developed woman’s body. What grown, heterosexual man finds breasts the sign of a ruined female body? Growing breasts is jumping the shark? Huh?

However, what I find heartening is the groups of silent people who awkwardly watch the spectacle I used to be able to blast into oblivion. Granted, those people are of no practical help and would never defend me but at least there is some semblance of what I recognize as a conscience somewhere. Two years ago, the complicit would have been what infuriated me the most but now it is the instigators who infuriate me. For some reason I have grown a soft spot for the hogtied, the silent resistance. In my old age, I have found compassion for those of us forced to live on our knees because we lack the psychotic streak that frees us and condemns us from the shackles of society. I would choose no other path but I do understand (and am jealous of their ability to conform) and can no longer fault them for their sheep-like behavior.

Fuck, I need to get my iPod situation fixed.