The Bitch Who Wouldn’t Sit ‘Bitch’

Our blogging brethren “My Effing Commute” has quite a funny story on a woman who refused to sit in the dreaded middle seat (“sitting bitch,” in biker parlance), so instead opted to stand and face backwards.

We’ve been collecting Metro-North related behavioral oddities for over three years, and this is one of the stranger ones.

Effing writes:

So standing or sitting on the floor are the two most common approaches to avoiding the uncomfortable feeling of touching another person. Turns out there is a third one which I didnt know about. Seems you can stand up at your seat, turn backwards facing the other riders, and scowl for 30 minutes, which is what this woman did. I kept wondering if she as looking for a friend, or an enemy, or a conductor, or happiness, or fulfillment, or a reason to keep going on. But she was standing for too long, so it didnt make sense. Maybe she had that shaky leg thing that you get when you cant sleep, or bad circulation like on planes when if you dont walk around every hour you can get a blood clot and die. But she wasn’t stretching or moving around at all. Just standing like a statue. A really pissed off statue. So what else could it be? It had to be that she just didnt want to touch the person in the seat next to her. Now in all fairnes, I couldnt see the person in the seat next to her, so its possible that this person was so repugnant that even the idea of sitting next to them was too horrible to imagine, but then why not go stand next to some other person, or even sit next to them? I still don’t know why this happened, and I havent seen her since, so I dont know if this was a one time occurrence or whether this was just how she enjoys riding the train. Either way, she’s just one more person on one more train ride of a lifetime of train rides that doesn’t make any effing sense.