Morning Breath (Alternate Title: "The Nose Knows")

Monday morning, I sat next to a gentleman on the train, who had construction boots strung to his bag, which he had placed on the seat next to him. Not enough of a deterrent to me, I sat on the other half of the seat not occupied by the boots. I had left late for work. I was agitated. I opened a book called"Randomness of Fools" and began reading.

After a few minutes, I felt his eyes glaze over my book, to my hands, to my chest, and up to my face. Shit, I thought to myself, he’s going to say something to me. I kept reading.

• "Are you studying for class?"
• "No, I just like reading."
• "Well, reading is good for you, especially being in school."

I knew how this conversation would go, so I sped it up:

• "I graduated from college nearly 10 years ago. I’m older than you think."
• "Oh yea? You’re not that old."
• "I’m 31."
• "Oh. I figured you were 20-21. I’m 32. That’s great."

I sighed, dirty old men have always creeped me out; even if now, those dirty "old" men are the same age as me. I could tell that he had consumed some malt beers the day before, with perhaps a weed chaser, and had gotten little sleep the night before. God endowed me with an overly active nose, so unfortunately, with every inhale I smelled the pungent mixer oozing from his pores and the coffee chaser on his breath.

My blackberry buzzed with a new text message. I checked,and went back to reading, hoping we were done, but knowing there was a question he hadn’t asked on the list. He inquired, "do you know how to log into myspace with this phone? My cousin just set-up an account for me." He had a MetroPCS. I looked down at his phone, noticed that he was trying to log-in with a yahoo email account. "Ask your cousin what your log-in name and password is." There was the cue up to the final question series, I thought.

• "OK. Thank you. Your husband must be a lucky man."
• I looked at him and thought what a stupid statement. "I’m not married," and showed him the hand that he had been staring at earlier.
• "A pretty woman like you needs a man in your life. You're too pretty to let that go to waste."
• "I have little interest in worrying about having a husband, I would much rather focus on my being happy."
• "Yea, life is too short to not be happy"
• "So, what do you think?"
• (I looked at him.)"About?"
• "What if I gave you my myspace?"
• "I don’t use myspace: too many hackers, too much dumb stuff."
• He laughed uncomfortably. "Yea, I don't know too much about that technology. It's new to me. I'm just learning to use this, here, phone. I could give you my number...
• I cut him off, "there is little to no chance that I will actually call you. I have numerous calls on my phone at this moment of whose calls I have not answered. I'd rather not add you to my list of phone calls I ignore."

Surprisingly, he said he was grateful for my honesty and said he wished more women would be straightforward like me. And that he wished he’d had more time to speak. (For what, I obviously was not interested in speaking). Alas I, on the other hand, was grateful that he had to get off of the train. Coffee breath is worse than stale cigarette breath, and either topped off with cheap liquor is too much for me to handle. My nose was happy when he was gone, as were my lungs since they could finally get a deep breath.