An old man pushed me

And here we degenerate into one of the more petty discussions that seem more typical of the blog lifestyle...

An old man pushed me this morning.

I was coming up out of the subway next to City Hall... there was a decent little jam of people making their way up the stairwell... and right as I came out, I kind of squeezed between a couple of people. This was one of those awkward manoeuvers where everyone's walking up the stairs in a dense, almost gelatinous mass and immediately turning left, except for me; I was going straight ahead. My preferred method is to look for an opening and lunge through it as quickly and efficiently as possible, so as to prevent the disruption of traffic. The only other option, really, is to stop and wait until the crowd clears out, which is undeniably the worst thing to do as you'll only get trampled.

So I squeezed through my opening, and the guy I was walking directly in back of intentionally stuck out his elbow and whacked me. I got clear of the crowd, stopped, turned around and gave him the glare for about 15 seconds. He just went on along his way, making grumpy mumbles. One weird thing about it was that I hadn't even gotten in his way; I was, after all, walking behind him... and it made it all seem like he had done it out of spite.

At first glance, this shouldn't seem at all profound. It is, after all, New York. But it wasn't the guy pushing me that struck me as odd. It was that I realized this was the first time this has happened in the two years I've been in New York.