Grumpy \'bout my people

Mixed-up Everything

Grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. Apparently, I don\'t fit into anybody\'s neat, tidy, clear-cut (with all that infers) boxes. Depending on the time of day, I could fit any of the following categories:

• Mexican
• Mestiza/Mixed
• Native American
• Portuges
• Latina
• Irish
• White
• Of fairly recent African descent (maternal great-great-grandparents)
• Appropriatin\' honky-ass bitch (OK, I made that up)
• Dyke
• Fag
• Transgendered
• Intersexed
• Butch
• Femme
• Straight
• Anarchist
• Suffering from an infantile disorder
• Oozing with entitlement
• Middle-class
• Poor

And the list goes on. All in all? I wish I could say on this particular day that I am proud of my polyglot nature, but on this particular Monday? I\'m just grumpy, and I really don\'t want to be in this urban paradise/nightmare called the Bay Area, which has it\'s own list of contradictions, many of which conflict with mine. For example:

• Liberal
• Intolerant
• Progressive
• Racist
• Green
• Smelly, dirty and polluted
• Loaded with race-sensitive white folks
• Loaded with race-ignorant white folks who love to correct you on your Spanish, parade their willingness to let black and brown folks run their own organizations as a marker of their enlightenment, think that Lake Merritt is \"quaint,\" but West Oakland is ::silence::, ask you if your speakin\' the same way your mama talks is \"fair to people of color,\" basically have their progressive head lodged somewhere between the inguinal canal and their sternum, and are living, breathing candidates for white flight the moment they top over $50K a year

About the only thing that is consistent so far:

• Expensive

But hopefully that will change soon (three cheers for failed dot-coms).

So what happened to make you so grumpy, you ask, and what does this have to do with BART?

OK. It\'s about 8:30 in the AM on Monday, which is really fuckin\' early for me any day of the week. I\'m gearin\' up to leave town, and in my haste to get from one place to another, I step out of line to get a BART ticket from a machine that doesn\'t have a line, see the machine is broken (who has the thankless job of removin\' those orange stickers that they plaster all over the ticket machines?), and get back in the line I was in, which happens to be shorter than the line next to me. All in the space of a couple of seconds. Typical commuter ballet.

So. Someone who just walked up to the long line gets pissed and I let her have my place, which she takes without so much as a hello. It being early in the morning, and not of sound enough mind to recognize a surly Monday morning tremblin\' transbay terror when I see her, I mutter \"there\'s two lines, but whatever\" -- you know, of the \"you\'re bein\' a little fucked up, but it\'s Monday, we\'re both tired, whatever\", variety of \"whatever\", you know?

We say some yadda yadda about all that, nothin\' major, BUT