Really Stupid Command Center

This is a confession of my shame.

Trivia at Robin Hood started off well. We named ourselves Stupid Command Center. I had visions of bar trivia as simple fun and not angry, bitter, brutal competitiveness. I want to win, sure. I always want to win but I rarely want it to turn into vitriol against other teams. So, we made a sort of pact about it. I had a vodka soda and then another and then we began discussing the gender of a person at the bar.

She was dressed in a dark rose colored button down shirt, black slacks and tennis shoes. She had a "boy cut". She was with another woman and they were flirtatious. We didn't know, at the time, whether she was a man or a woman and that became the topic of conversation at the table. There wasn't any malice in it but we were in the middle of this British bar filled with a mostly 40 and over set of what, on the surface, seemed like a very suburban White American crowd and there was this incongruence: a trivia team with a member who defied traditional gender roles. We discussed in depth her hips and lips and whether or not they were male or female.

We laughed. We got loud. When their team name was announced - "Serenity Girls" - and the mystery was solved, we got louder.

They noticed.

Now, while discussing the way someone looks isn't the classiest thing to do in the world, I'm not above it. We make all kinds of decisions in life based on appearance, for better or for worse. But, when that kind of behavior rises to such an obnoxious level that it has the potential to ruin someone else's good time, well, then I fucked up.

These two women were having a lovely time during trivia. I had no right to encroach on that. The idea that I may have sat with me for the rest of the evening  and continues into this morning. I wanted to apologize to them. To buy them a drink. To let them know who I am as a person. The reality, though, is that who I was as a person last night was someone who would judge and mock someone for their appearance to such a degree as to be That Asshole in the bar.

Artgeek wrote something a month ago that has stuck with me: other people do not exist for my aesthetic pleasure. I forgot that last night.

So, this is a confession of my shame.

I'm sorry.