Public transit adventures, episode 497

Oh my gosh! I'm still having trouble breathing after this morning's commute. I got on the bus and there were a lot of seats in the back, to which I thought, "SCORE!" When I sat down, I instantly realized why all those seats were open... a homeless domestically challenged guy was sitting right next me! As the bus started filling up, the temperature started to rise as did the stench. I had to consiously avoid breathing through my nose, despite knowing that every inhalation filled my lungs with whatever foul emanations were hovering around the guy. Then, to make matters worse, he kept shifting around, spreading the scent. When we got to my stop, I bolted from the bus and tried to exhale as much as possible to get whatever was in my lungs out. Even now, an hour later, I swear I can still smell it in my clothes! I think I might have to run over to the gym for a 45-minute shower and just wear my gym clothes back to work. Uggg!

That experience reminds me of something I wrote on this blog a while back. Here's an excerpt:

The last Harry Potter movie we went to on opening night, we made the mistake of waiting to get in line only ONE hour before the movie started. We ended up sitting two or three rows from the screen, which always makes me sick, and scared my contacts are going to pop out. Anyway, we sit down and decide we can deal with the seats, since it IS opening night and we're kind of rowdy as a group; having fun, etc., when someone sits down in front of me with the absolute WORST B.O. I have EVER SMELLED IN MY ENTIRE LIFE--and I've been to Oklahoma, so that's saying something! It was an unimaginable stench--but if you would like to try imagining a mere HINT of it, try thinking of a leperous hobo that hasn't seen bathwater since his train left Milwaukee back in 1968 AND he has a catfish that he caught just outside of Denver on that same trip in his pocket that he's been saving "for a rainy day" AND the railroad engineer, upon finding him, pushed him off the train into an open cesspool. That should give you a little whiff of what we had to endure. It was so bad that anyone with an outer layer of clothing took it off to breathe through it, and someone found a vial of lavendar essential oil in her purse, which we applied to our upper lips. That odor STILL made it through, but at least it was downgraded to nauseating instead of toxic. The SECOND the credits started rolling, we were climbing over one another in an attempt to leave the theatre. While the others in our group were doing it to flee the putrefaction, I was actually doing it because I'd made the mistake of drinking a large Diet Coke at the start of the movie and my bladder had backed up into my kidneys. Fortunately I escaped the whole ordeal without a bladder infection or a diminished olfactory sense.

At least this time, it was only 15 minutes and not the 2 and half HOURS in a movie theatre!