I have endometriosis. It’s a fairly common condition, which is unfortunate, because it can also be extremely painful and lead to a whole lot of other physical and mental health problems.

I have just had my second surgery, which went well enough, but I have been in pain and feeling quite weak for a few days after. On the first day I feel like leaving the house, I am to meet my partner for lunch at a place not too far away from home. Usually, I would walk, but I’m still weak, so I opt to take the tram for two stops.

This particular tram line is not used a lot, especially on these stops, so I have the whole vehicle to myself. I still don’t take a priority seat, preferring a seat right near the door, so it would be easier to get up and out; in contrast to this, priority seats have more space that can also accommodate wheelchairs, walkers, prams, etc.

On the next stop, a woman also gets in, carrying a multitude of shopping bags. She turns around, sees me, and decides to stand right next to me, huffing dramatically. Again, the tram is otherwise empty.

I could explain that I have just had surgery and prefer to sit next to the door and that she is free to take any of the remaining fifty-nine seats. However, it’s none of her business, and… she’s free to take any of the remaining fifty-nine seats!

So, I prefer to pretend not to see her, looking happily through the window. I get off at the next stop, and she huffs again because she has to move for me to stand up and again in order to take the seat.

I like to tell this story when people tell me young people are inconsiderate. I would probably have sucked it up if the tram had been full and she had bothered to ask me. But being passive-aggressive with me will only bring people more of the same.

During my preteen and teen years, my dad made it a family goal to take me and my brother camping to every cold spring in Florida. After a while of doing this, we had a pretty solid routine down, so one morning, I get ready to go swimming first and grab a couple of watermelons to chill with me while my dad and brother secure the site.

I swim out to the middle of the spring, where it’s blasting out water up from beneath me, and relax back with my fruity buoys. A while passes and I realize that my family hasn’t joined me. I look around and spot them in a crowd standing on the boardwalk on the shore, so I start to paddle over. They must have already seen where I was, as the moment I start moving, they both frantically start waving their arms and making Xs in a clear “DO NOT COME OVER HERE” signal. Not one to argue with that sort of display, I settle in to wait.

Eventually, my family does join me, along with a throng of people who had also been held up on the boardwalk, and I learn what happened. A family had entered the water before everyone and one of their children had apparently soiled themselves to the point that their swimsuit was bulging with it. The child was jumping up and trying to get onto one of the blow-up floats the family had, but kept missing, and each time they missed little logs would pop out and go floating down the river. Obviously, no one wanted to enter the water with this going on, thus the crowd.

Thankfully, my position in the spring kept all the water flowing away from me, and the river itself was fast-moving, so the… debris… was cleared quickly, but I still don’t understand why the family didn’t just take their child to get cleaned up or how they remained oblivious to the problem they caused around them!

I am lucky enough to live in a relatively nice neighborhood with a culturally diverse population in a liberal part of the USA. Therefore, it is not too uncommon to see some houses proudly showing off some Black Lives Matter banners without ruffling too many feathers. My family decides that we want to be included, so my two children make one of our own and we put it up near our mailbox.

The next day, I happen to be doing some cleaning in the living room and spy that a middle-aged woman in a business suit has pulled up and is trying to remove the BLM sign from our property! I march right out.

Me: “Excuse me, ma’am, but what do you think you’re doing?!”

The woman jumps when she sees me, but then her stare becomes cold and her body language confrontational.

Woman: “You live here?”

Me: “Yes, and you’re stealing from my property.”

Woman: “Do you own this house?”

Me: “That’s irrelevant. Please put down that sign and leave, immediately.”

Woman: “You shouldn’t be putting up racist posters like this! It’s bad for the community!”

Me: “Whatever views my family wishes to express on our own property are our concern, not yours.”

Woman: “But you’re bringing down the neighborhood! This neighborhood used to be so nice and now it’s full of…”

I can see she’s struggling to finish her sentence without sounding like a racist. I let her stutter for a moment, hoping she comes to the conclusion that it’s impossible, but she’s committed!

Me: “Ma’am, please put down my sign, get back in your car, and—”

This is when I look into her car for the first time. Her back door is open and I can see no less than FIVE other BLM posters tossed back there! Then I look at the woman again, and it dawns on me; that business suit, that face, that Karen hairstyle… I have seen this woman’s realty ads plastered all over town!

Me: “Are… are you stealing BLM posters because you’re worried about how it will affect house prices?!”

Woman: “Well… they will! I won’t be able to get any respectable clientele if they think this town was full of racist thugs!”

Me: “Lady, I am a forty-five-year-old housewife in sweatpants. Do I look like a racist thug to you? Get off my property! I am going to be calling your bosses to let them know what you’re doing!”

Woman: “You can’t prove it!”

And with that, she kicked my BLM sign one more time for good measure and drove off. I stared long and hard at her car as it careened down the road — dangerously, I might add.

I re-entered my house, composed myself, finished the cleaning, and then settled down in front of my computer. I accessed the recording from the security camera on my front porch, found the footage of my altercation with the racist realtor, and emailed it to both the police and the realty company she works for, providing both her name and the license plate of her car.

Before the end of the day, I received an email back from the head honcho of the company informing me that her employment with them had been terminated immediately and that she had been arrested by the police for the destruction of private property.

I don’t expect everyone to share my political views, but it’s the first time they’ve been accused of bringing down the housing market!

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I am on the train on my way home from university during the global crisis. Due to this and the fact that it is about noon in a smaller city, the carriage I am sitting in is almost completely empty. I decide that, rather than leave my laptop bag on the floor, I will place it on the seat next to me as I figure no one will want to sit there anyway.

Boy, was I wrong.

Enter an older lady. I can already tell we are going to have a problem when she gets on as she is not wearing a mask, and I can see a large crucifix on her neck. This is relevant because I am nineteen, I have tattoos and dyed blue hair, and I am wearing a mask I sewed myself. Oh, boy.

As she enters, she meets my eye and scowls, then walks towards me and decides she needs to sit right next to me, on my bag. I am very non-confrontational, but this is annoying me. She could have sat anywhere else, and I briefly worry she will break my laptop. I try to politely ask her to sit up for a moment so I can at least retrieve my bag, and she pretends she can’t understand me because of my mask. She just keeps repeating that I should remove my mask if I want to speak like a “civilised person”.

Eventually, I get fed up and just rip my bag out from under her, and I then make my biggest mistake by cursing under my breath. Suddenly, Karen can understand me perfectly and proceeds to yell at me about respect and God until my stop, despite me moving seats several times and blanking her.

The funniest part is that I volunteer at a nursing home, and I am Anglican, but I guess I don’t look like she thinks Christians should.

There is a nature preserve near my house with a path all around a lake and a floating bridge across one section of it. For a long time, it was made of wood, but in the past few years, it has been replaced with a man-made material. It is constructed of many separate sections to accommodate for shifts in water level, with ramped metal connections in between.

One day, when I’m walking the loop, I decide to take a picture of a duck that is standing no more than two feet from me, completely chill with my presence. I hear someone approaching on the bridge — the connectors unfortunately make a lot of noise when stepped on — think nothing of it, and keep snapping away.

Then, the approaching woman addresses me.

Woman: “The kids must love this, huh?”

Me: *Smiling* “Yeah, they—”

The woman SLAMS her foot on the next metal connector.

Woman: “Such a nice sound, isn’t it?”

I just stare at her, shocked, as she walks to the next one.

Woman: “Coming out here to enjoy the nature and—” *SLAM* “—scaring all the birds away!” *SLAM* “It’s just so nice, isn’t it?” *SLAM*

She proceeded to stomp on every single connector for the entire rest of the bridge, raising her knee to hip-height each time for maximum stompage, repeating her complaints to every single group on the bridge, some of which included small children that never made a peep.

Eventually, she rounded a corner behind some brush, but even a hundred feet away, I could still hear her stomping and complaining all the way back to land.

Relieved to know someone was setting such a good example for the next generation as to how they should act in nature, I turned back to my duck. For some reason, she’d flown away. How odd.