Last night's drink: more Rex.

Every morning I wake up with a million things I want to write about, and I have to find a way to parse them out before my head starts spinning and I finish the contents of my four-cup coffee maker.

Last night, I came across an article in Slate called "Sucker Punch - The art, the poetry, the idiocy of YouTube street fights." Aside from some debatable points, such as purporting that street fighting is the contemporary take on Martial Arts, and some excellent tips on how not to accidentally become the star of one of these videos, the article takes on a sort of reflective and even endearing view of the clips he has chosen as examples.

As I was reading through the article, I was reminded of some incidences that I had edited out of my original Thanksgiving post, which included two separate occasions where I came uncomfortably close to getting into physical altercations with men. This is not run-of-the-mill for me, not really. I've never been in any sort of fist fight before, but I have had more of these sort of "close calls" in the past two years than I have had in the time preceding. Which leads me to ask two questions: 1) Why am I suddenly so scrappy? and 2) Why do these guys want to fight a girl?

There are four or five instances where I've come close to calling out. The first happened at the Lamplighter, where my gay friend Kyle and I were standing outside smoking. A young guy probably five inches shorter than me started bashing him with a bunch of homophobic B.S. I think I probably just told him to shut up at first, but he continued to yell these awful things across the patio, which just pissed me off more. We finally decided to walk down the street and get Mexican food, and as we did, I pushed this guy directly in the chest with one hand, which sent him stumbling, drunk, off the curb and into the gutter. Lucky for me, I suppose, he was too drunk to know who, or what, had hit him. So that was one.

The others have a similar bar theme, though not all of them involve drinking on my part. The next close call happened when I was bartending alone on a busy night and this short guy, who was being a jerk anyway, came in with a lit cigarette and while staring straight at me simply dropped the cigarette on the floor and twisted it out with his foot. The other two guys were also short and disrespecting me to my face, though one was just a small man in terms of moral character. He took my phone from my purse and called his phone after I told him I wouldn't give him my number. I think he also broke into his ex's house and stole all her underwear. But that's another story.

The running themes in these encounters is that I really don't like being disrespected, the guys that want to fight me are typically shorter than I am, and alcohol is usually within reach. The easy answer here is alcohol, but I don't think that's the whole answer. I go out all the time, I see short guys all the time, and I get disrespected on occasion - this is just the magic combination for flipping my fighting switch. And for some reason, my being tall, confident, and liqoured up is theirs. I'll leave you with your own theories on the Napoleon complex, et al... though I'm sure Napoleon would have kicked my ass.

Looking back to the variety of the sort of fighter memes in the article, I try to imagine what I would look like on YouTube if any of the above actually had progressed. I think it's safe to say that I'd be pretty uncoordinated, about the whole thing, but that doesn't mean I would lose. One factor I haven't mentioned yet is the growing impatience and anger I have inside of me for mean people in general. It's true that it's the quiet ones you have to watch out for.

Thumb wrestling anyone?