Sledgehammer Fantasies It's the honking that kills me. Every time. So, I catch my bus on 16th street in D.C. I was unaware that the fact that I catch my bus there makes it o.k.. for every Tom, Dick and Sleazy to lay on the horn as they pass where I am standing, waiting in the 90 degree/90% humidity Washington weather, but apparently it is. It isn't even like I'm in a micro mini and a tube top (not that it would make the yelling and stuff o.k., but at least I'd see where they were coming from). I'm in long pants and some kind of at least semi-professional looking shirt, cuz wearing a micro mini to the lab where some army doofus who wanders in could turn over your beaker of acid into your lap seems like a dumb idea, no? So I not only am freaked out by this honking and screaming, I don't get it. Fine, great, they are appreciative of the fact that there are women on the street and they have boobs, and presumably all the other ancillary things that tend to distinguish the genders from one another, but I really can't wrap my mind around the fact that this appreciation must needs be take the form of noise. It isn't really like they expect me to run after their car and have a deep interpersonal relationship, so why not appreciate whatever they are getting out of my sweaty body standing on the corner in contemplative silence? I have a reoccurring fantasy that pops into my head when passing construction sites, or standing at the corner at Walter Reed on 16th. If I only had a sledgehammer, I muse to myself, a large one with a dark and menacing heavy iron head, there would be no more honks from the horns of Chevy Camaros, no more toots from the absurdly effeminate SUVs, or blasts from the air horns of cement trucks. There would be peace and serenity on 16th, disturbed only by the suppressed thrum of thousands of commuters trying to almost not hit one another. The sledgehammer would become the icon of the contemplative woman-on-the-go, a woman too busy to deal with street harassment. Usually at about this point in the fantasy, some guy screams "NrIsCwE ApSjS." out the window of his car (it sounds like Martian, but if you look carefully you'll see what they were trying to say) and the bubble is burst. Sigh. Still, there is always the possibility that I'll get issued an Army-grade sledgehammer one of these days, so honkers better beware!