Weirdness...

Yesterday wasn't the best of days. I was PMSing--never a good thing--and felt like a zombie (not enough sleep, my own fault for staying up too late watching a movie on the Silver channel). Anyway, I'd had a morning class in Hammarbyhöjden and was on my way back into town when this wiggy older man sat next to me on the subway. Now, this in itself is by no means weird. Strange old men seem to gravitate to me--much like skanky men often approach me and say the most vile things to me (my friend Dave once told me this was due to my having an invisible tattoo on my forehead that only icky, skanky men could read ha-ha). Usually these strange old men try to tell me their life stories or babble about something they read in the newspaper that they are sure I must know something about. Most of the time, I humor them. Yesterday I was creeped out and wanted nothing to do with the weird guy sitting beside me.

Why? Well, first of all, he had this freaky Charles Manson crazy stare. Then he started talking to himself and kept hitting my leg. I got up and moved to another seat. He turned and stared at me from Gullmarsplan all the way to Gamla Stan. By the time we'd arrived at T-Centralen, I was completely wigged out by this old guy.

As I got off the subway at T-Centralen, I noticed the old guy had disembarked through another door. He was on the platform before me and he pointed at me and started chanting, "Neger...neger...neger!" (The Swedish variant of "N*gger...n*gger...n*gger!"). I ignored him, then he apparently found some more black people to follow because I heard him chanting it again and when I looked over my shoulder he was walking behind a younger African woman. She turned around and slapped him with her handbag before she continued towards the steps to the other levels of the station.

Then I started thinking about being called "neger" and how nowadays I just ignore it whereas if someone had called me a nigger in the States or when I was younger it would have set off a huge explosion of whoop-ass. Am I becoming Swedified and sticking my head in the sand? Is it because I am getting older and am learning to let things slide? Have I learned to simply ignore crazy people? Was this all one of those "Candid Camera"-style moments that will eventually pop up on some TV program for the entertainment of the bored couch potatoes of Stockholm?

I don't know the answer, but I can say it didn't make me feel riled up in any way. Maybe these last few months of yoga and Ki-balans and finding this "tranquility within me" (which always sounded like mumbo jumbo before) is actually making me feel calmer. Who knows?