This is Why I Never Take Greyhound.

When I left Boston for New Haven after visiting N and K, my estimated time of arrival to NH was 9:50pm. After I realized I had accidentally entered into an alternate universe of Spanish curse words, bald police officers, Zoroastrian, "perfect" Nordic beauties, and why racial inequality is OK, I knew I was doomed to ride this bus until the end of time.

So I was pretty content for the first hour or so, because despite almost missing my bus to begin with (Boston traffic, kthnxbye), there was an outlet situated 4 inches from my right foot, so I could use my Droid as an iPod and not have it die on me. All was well in the world. After a brief stop in Providence, the bus arrived at Foxwoods Casino in CT for a supposed <1 minute layover. That's when doom started to kick in. I had my headphones on, so it took me a while to notice that there was commotion going on at the very front of the bus. I was only 5 rows back, so I had a fairly good view after I tuned into the escandalo. The issue was very confusing, but from what I could gather, it was an older woman with a cane and her husband/caretaker VS the bus driver. This showdown apparently came about because she was being difficult and shouting "I'm disabled, you have to accommodate me," and wanted one particular seat that already had someone in it, and even though the bus driver offered her three other acceptable seats (one of which was the actual "seat for disabled persons" that she originally requested with her ticket), she refused and got quite belligerent. She and her husband started yelling things at the driver (and nasty things in Spanish, too), until the driver got pissed and started yelling back, that he didn't want them on his bus, that they had to get out. Well, of course, the woman refused to get off, citing her disability and the fact that she was Native American as cause for this to be considered unfair treatment, and so she didn't have to move (what does her ethnicity have to do with all this?).

Now the entire bus is watching as the bus driver storms off, muttering darkly, and the woman complains loudly to everyone in the vicinity about how this is unfair and she won't stand for it. Unfortunately for her, nobody on the bus is very sympathetic towards this woman who made a huge scene, yelled rude things, played the race card, and is also making us all late for whatever we have to do. The police officers that showed up after this weren't too sympathetic either. They asked the nearby passengers what really happened, so one lady (from whom the crazy woman tried to coerce a seat) started explaining that the woman and her husband had been really rude to the driver, who was just doing his job. She mentioned that the crazy woman had cursed at the driver in Spanish, which was immediately backed up by everyone else in the first 4 rows with a loud "MM-HMM!" Then the woman tried to defend herself: "No, nuh-uh, I did not curse at the driver. I said one thing in Spanish, I'm Mexican, you see [I thought she was Native American...?]. I didn't call him a bad word. I just called him a whore." o__O

WELL. Even though she obviously didn't do anything wrong (I mean, there's nothing wrong with calling someone a whore, right?), the big bald bodyguard-looking police officer made her get off the bus and she was forced to wait for the next bus, a 4:15am one from Foxwoods. By now, 45 minutes of our lives had been taken in a rather amusing showdown between this woman and everyone else (she yelled at various passengers that tried to reason with her) and then we finally hit the road again.

While this was going on and I still had my headphones in, a skinny middle-aged man asked if he could sit next to me. I sighed inwardly and moved my bag onto my lap. At one point that the crazy woman was shouting in Spanish outside, this man (despite my headphones) asked me if I understood what she was saying. I said yes, thinking that he couldn't understand and wanted me to explain. But he instead said, "Oh, really? Hablas español?" with a bit of incredulity in his voice. I didn't expect him to speak Spanish, honestly, so I responded, surprised, "Si, soy Colombiana" (my standard explanation, much to GBM's amusement). Turns out, this man is Peruvian (of immediate European descent, as he hastened to tell me), so we launch into a conversation in Spanish for the next 20ish minutes. He asks the usual: Had I gotten on the bus at Foxwoods? So, where? Was I going to New York? Oh, New Haven? What did I do there? What school? What? Yale? Really? You go to Yale?

If I had a TimeTurner, this is the point at which I would go back and change my answer to: "JK! I don't go to Yale. I go to Gateway Community College, so an arrogant snob like you won't want to enter into a 2-hour long intellectual conversation with me." Sadly, all the TimeTurners were smashed so I can't do that. So instead, my night took a turn for the worse. He took my admission of being a Yale student to mean he could embark on a power trip that I would maybe possibly kinda understand--despite the fact that he clearly thought I was stupid, I doubt he would have deemed anyone else on the bus acceptable enough to talk at.

Our conversation started in Spanish, but he would periodically translate words into English, especially after I admitted that no, I wasn't born in Colombia and was never schooled there. After that he continuously referred to me as American. He talked about his grand dislike for Choate, where he went to escape the dictatorship that was going on in Peru at the time. The one good thing that came from his monologue was the history lesson that accompanied it. He didn't like Choate because he was "bullied for not being a WASP" and nobody knew anything about Peru or cared to know anything about Peru. He actually applied to Yale (don't know if he got in...), but told me he's "always had problems reading quickly" so he didn't think he could take the course load here. He ended up going to Harvard (take that as you will). After studying Poli Sci for a bit, he left Harvard because it was too much for him and transferred to NYU (why would that be easier??), where he majored in Chemistry, because it was the most non-conflict major he could think of. For someone who couldn't handle Harvard, he was astonishingly arrogant and quite an asshole.

We somehow got onto the topic of his dislike of Freud and Einstein and their influences from Nietzsche. And by "we," I mean "he" because I quickly realized that even when I wanted to challenge his views in what I thought was gonna be a spirited intellectual exchange, he would shut me down and actually cut me off, saying, "Wait, I'm not done yet." This is around the time he switched from Spanish to English, because I'm convinced he thought I couldn't handle the Spanish because I wasn't born in Colombia, especially since he would translate random things for me, insisting he didn't know how much or little I knew. Even in English, he would define things like "overwhelming" and "haughty" (WTF). Why the hell does he think I'm getting a Yale degree? Sure, when he asked me things about philosophy, I knew pretty much nothing, but that's because I'VE NEVER TAKEN A PHILOSOPHY CLASS. It's not inability, it's lack of exposure. He thought I was dumb, so I was banned from talking for the rest of the TWO HOURS.

His next goal was to explain his three-fold reason for why God exists. Now, he was not a radical religion preacher dude. He was a radical intellectual. This man really knew his history and philosophers and things like that, and some of what he was saying I found really interesting. But then a larger part of what he was saying was absolutely ridiculous.

I don't remember reason number 1, but when I remember I'll edit this post.

Reason number 2 is synchronicity. The idea is that you can have two separate events that occur at the same time without any causality between them, but with an underlying meaning in common. The example he used was the 6th century BC, when Lao Tzu and Confucius and Zoroaster were founding Taoism and Confucianism and Zoroastrianism respectively (at this point I managed to ask if Zoroaster didn't come earlier, because I thought he proceeded these other organized religions, but he just said, "no"). According to Greyhound Dude (GD), these men didn't know anything about each other, didn't know the other existed, let alone held beliefs that would turn into major world religions, but they all started to happen around the same time. Surely the chances of this happening without a common design are too small to be coincidence. So someone must be controlling these actions, so there must be a God.

I don't believe that there was no influence between these religions or that it's as simple as they all got the idea one morning at the same time. I think it's way more complicated than that and I think I believe in coincidence, but his theory of synchronicity is interesting from an academic point of view. That wasn't the ridiculously radical part.

In talking about this, he explained that Christianity in particular was almost perfect. But of course, there have been many false prophets throughout the course of history, people who do more damage than good and are led by Satan. His first example? Muhammad. "What is now Iraq used to be Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. And look at what 1400 years of Islam has done to that region of the world--they were once a great people and now they are at the bottom. These people don't know how to cooperate or communicate, they're just violent and destroy things." WTF?!

Speaking of perfect, he moved onto his third reason: God must exist because perfect beauty exists. And what is his idea of perfect beauty? Nordic people. Blonde, blue eyes. "When people cut the crap, that's who everyone thinks is the most beautiful in the world. They are our ideal of perfect beauty. Now, I don't want you to think I'm defending the WASPs in everything, no no. I acknowledge that they are more beautiful than any other people, but I'm not saying anything good about their intelligence. They're incredibly stupid." WTF??! He was convinced that every Nordic (and therefore beautiful) person was completely lacking in intelligence. He used extremely offensive terms like "pack of idiots" and adhered to "dumb blonde" jokes, finding support for them in a German phrase that translates to "little dumb blonde one." Just because another language has a phrase for it doesn't mean it's true. He also insisted that God made people with beauty, with brains, or neither, but never with both. He would laugh cruelly, saying, "if you were to show me someone with beauty AND brains, I'd think it were Christ incarnate; it's just not possible." I could not believe what I was hearing. He continued, saying men only found blonde women attractive, meaning he found me both unattractive AND stupid, which I did not appreciate. But every time I indignantly started to say something to counter him, he would cut me off and tell me he wasn't done yet. I wanted to throttle him.

It only got worse when he moved back to Christianity. "The only thing missing from Christianity," he said, "is the concept of karma." He believed in infinite karma, not too much on a meritocracy basis but more of a "everyone will get to be reincarnated as everyone/everything at some point" kind of mentality. And he used this to explain why racial and gender inequality was a stupid thing to be concerned about. According to GD, "It makes no sense to care about inequality. If you have less than me in money, power, whatever, relax. You'll have more than me in the next life. And if you're a woman now, there's no need to try to make men and women equal. Relax, you'll be a man in your next life." Relax??? There were SO many things wrong with what this man was saying, and I couldn't get a word in edgewise. It was so frustrating, and he was so convinced he was completely right about everything and so unwilling to listen to me at all. Coupled with the fact that he thought I wasn't intellectually worthy and actually just downright dumb and also unattractive for being a brunette, this was not a pleasant conversation.

I finally saw Union Station and could have cried from relief. As I got up to get off the bus of doom, GD said, "well, I hope we meet again." To which I replied, "Yeah, maybe in another life." But he insisted, "No, in this one." And then I ran away.

It is now 3 in the morning and I have to get up for work in about 4 hours, but I wanted to get all of this ridiculousness down before I forgot everything. That left me without time to analyze anything, but I'm still kind of flabbergasted that someone could think these things and try to shove these extremist thoughts down my throat. I hope you, oh lone reader, have thoughts on this experience, because it was honestly one of the weirdest things that has ever happened to me, and I still don't even know how I sat there and actually let him continue for so long. Thankfully, my really chill NH cab driver brought me back to reality in the best way possible, further securing New Haven taxi drivers in their spot within my favorite people in the world list (after Yalies).

Greyhound, I hope we never meet again, in this, or ANY, lifetime..