Maybe she gave me a soul

I got on the train this morning and noticed a single empty seat. I was one of the last people at my station to board, and several people were standing, and my first thought when I saw the seat was actually What's wrong with it? There didn't seem to be anything unseemly on it, nor anything amiss about the people on either side of it (they weren't even spilling over their own seats, as is so often the case).

I had a very full and heavy backpack on, and my laptop case over my shoulder. I stood by the seat and put the laptop on the floor between my feet, and the backpack was halfway off of one shoulder when a short middle-aged white woman wedged herself between me and the seat. Instinctively, I stepped a bit closer to the seat as I slipped my backpack strap the rest of the way off my arm. "Excuse me," I said.

"This my seat," she said in some kind of Eastern European accent. "I was here." What, had she gotten up to look around the subway and then come back? Was the MTA selling popcorn now?

"Um, no you weren't," I said.

"This my seat!" she said, and she pushed me, but not hard enough to move my feet.

Without touching her, I sat down, as I said "Ma'am, I was here first, I was just taking off my bag so I could sit down." This would have been clear to anyone. Including me, had the tables been turned. There's a definite dog-eat-dog mentality to the subway at rush hour, but within that is usually a willingness to admit when you've been beaten. You concede the seat or the prime spot to those who are faster or ruder than you are.

The woman bent down and looked me in the eye, and said, shaking her finger, "You have no education, and you are never a gentleman!" With her Slavic accent and piercing stare, I had the unshakable sense that I was being placed under a Gypsy curse.

Rather than tell her about my excellent education, or that I am often a gentleman, I smiled and said "Thanks," as she walked away. I kept looking around for her, partly out of concern but mostly out of fear, but she seemed to have disappeared. The train wasn’t that crowded and I assume she got a seat elsewhere.

I can't argue with her that a "gentleman" would have simply given her the seat. But would a "lady" have shoved me? If she'd been more polite about it, I probably would have given her the seat. I've always considered chivalry, in the traditional sense of the word, to be a sexist concept. The idea of men holding doors and giving up seats for women implies that women are incapable of opening doors or standing. This is not to say that I don't believe in being polite; I hold doors for all sorts of people all the time, and give up seats for anyone who needs them more than I do. While I have no rules about not hitting women, I do have rules about not hitting anyone. And I know plenty of women who could beat the crap out of me if they chose to.

The Gypsy Queen wasn't old (though she was older than I), wasn't carrying anything heavy (as I was), and clearly wasn't infirm if she was willing to pick a fight with me. I had as much right to that seat as she did, perhaps more as it got me and my gigantic bag out of the way of other passengers. And I did get there first.

In the end, I felt a little guilty anyway. But by then it was a matter of principle. I wasn't going to let her shove me when a simple "Excuse me," would have gotten her what she wanted. So I sat for the entire ride. I was afraid the entire train now thought I was an asshole (well, a bigger asshole than I deserved to be thought of as), but took comfort in the fact that the woman's outburst had also made her look like a complete nut-job.

I suppose the up-side is that a Gypsy curse would give me something to blame for all the stuff that goes wrong normally.