Day 21: Fishface

Today's BBC news website reports on how police are cracking down on train gropers in Tokyo, and how two thirds of women have experienced being groped on trains. It sounds funny, until you experience it. When you live in Tokyo and need to ride the train, you develop an intuition for these gropers and learn to move away or shield yourself with a bag. It makes you wonder what social malaise bears these sick, sick people. Well, better late than never. I hope the police catches them all.

I am reading an interesting book on intuition. Female intuition, gut feeling, you name it, I am loaded with it. When I think back to people I have known over the years, my first impression usually turns out right. Despite reasonable and rational thinking to modify first impressions, a good person ends up being good, a strange person ends up being strange, a selfish person ends up being selfish, and a rude person ends up proving to be rude.

Which reminds me of a story called "Rude Rabbit". Rude Rabbit liked a rabbit called Honey Bun. He tells her " Give me a kiss, Honey Bun.", and is promptly dismissed. He calls out to someone over the fence, "Oy, fishface!" The lesson of the story is that Rude Rabbit learns the hard way that he must be polite to be liked. Today, I discover that a neighbor has been very impolite. I see her over the fence as I walk Charlie and later think I should have hollered "OY, FISHFACE!" But since I have been to Rude Rabbit's Rudeness Roadshow, my intuition tells me the compliment will be wasted.