A Firsthand Encounter with Karen
Aug. 22nd, 2020 09:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingI wake up around 6:30 every morning, read for a bit, do some weight training, take a shower, and start working at around 7:30. By around 1:00 in the afternoon, I am sick of being in the house. In the beforetimes, this is when I would go to campus, go to the library, go to a café, go to the park, or whatever. I enjoy sitting and working outside.
None of that is possible now, so I’ve taken to sitting in my car with the windows cracked open. I can usually tolerate only about an hour of this before I get overheated or have to use the bathroom or something, but it’s still good to get out of the house and soak in some Vitamin D once or twice a week.
There’s a small street next to my apartment building with a lot of trees, so it’s possible to sit there quietly in the shade and not be bothered by pedestrians or passing traffic. Unfortunately, there was a heat wave two weeks ago, and one day it got so hot that I had to turn the car on to run the air conditioning. I dislike air conditioning, which always makes me feel like I’m catching a cold for some reason. On this day it was 95° in the shade, though, so air conditioning felt like less of a luxury and more of a necessity. I turned the car off again after about five minutes and didn’t think too much about it.
I was working on a deadline and super caught up in what I was writing, but I eventually noticed a woman in her late forties standing on the sidewalk and staring at me. I turned on the car, rolled down the window, and asked if she was okay.
She told me that idling your car is illegal in Philadelphia, and that she was going to call the police. When I (politely) asked what the fuck she was on about, she kept repeating the same three sentences about how idling your car is illegal, how it’s bad for the environment, and how she’s going to call the police if I don’t stop.
This woman was standing outside of a three-story, seven-bedroom townhouse in 100° weather while wearing a cardigan over a sweater, meaning that she hadn’t skimped on her own air conditioning. Despite having a Black Lives Matter sign prominently displayed in her yard, she was threatening to call the police on me for parking on her street.
(Before you ask, the answer is yes.)
Just to be clear, Philadelphia’s anti-idling law only applies to large and diesel-fueled vehicles, and it’s aimed at preventing industrial pollution. I will readily admit that me idling for five minutes while blasting the air conditioning in my Honda Fit wasn’t great for the environment, but it was obvious that this lady wasn’t really concerned about trees and plants. Anti-harassment laws in Philadelphia are very specific about there needing to be “overtly malicious intent” “after dark” for someone to be charged with loitering (I know this because it ended up becoming a major concern of the city’s BLM movement), so this woman must have waited and watched me until she saw me doing something that she could use as an excuse to threaten to call the police. Yikes.
Still, I get that it can be creepy for someone to sit in their car on your street and type for an hour once or twice a week. Most people would shrug it off as “Well, it’s a pandemic, we’re all doing the best we can,” but some people are sensitive. And that’s okay! It must be difficult to live in a three-story, seven-bedroom house with a back garden and not be able to just, like, move to another room.
So I apologized, told the woman I understood, thanked her for her concern, and moved the car to a different street a few blocks over. I felt weird about the whole thing, so I haven’t so much as taken a walk in the neighborhood since then. Instead of sitting in my car, I drive to a park on the other side of the neighborhood and sit there. I feel guilty about being outside in a public place during a pandemic, but whatever. I’m far from the only person there, and everyone wears masks. We’re all doing the best we can, you know?
Now, more than two weeks later, this woman has put up enormous anti-idling signs on the telephone poles at the intersections outside both ends of her street. What this means is that she went out of her way to design these signs and get them printed, and she also went through the trouble of going downtown to stand in line at City Hall and apply for the permit to post them. Wow.
I can totally see how this might not be about me, but I doubt it. The signs specify that idling is not allowed on that particular street, for one thing, and I’ve never actually seen anyone idling on that stretch of road. There are only about seven or eight townhouses on either side of the street before it dead-ends into a larger road at either end, so it’s unlikely that there were other incidents – it’s just too small of an area.
There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but what I think happened is that this woman doesn’t like it that there’s open street parking on her block, or that just anyone can park in front of her large and expensive townhouse. Street parking on that block is almost always totally full, and there’s a lot of traffic on the larger roads, so it’s not like I was sitting alone in a solitary car right in front of her house and being weird. Still, she probably pays more than three thousand dollars a month on property tax alone, and she has the right not to have to look at people who are less wealthy than her in her urban and densely-populated neighborhood in West Philadelphia.
I’ve read any number of opinion pieces and editorials about “Karen,” but I get the feeling that people might be overthinking things a bit. Putting the delicate issue of mental health aside, some people are just crazy, and I think what frustrates everyone so much about the Karens of the world is their entitlement in assuming that their particular brand of antisocial behavior is not just normative but an actual service to the community.
Obviously – obviously! – I’m not going to do anything in response, but I can’t help but be a little upset. I know this has nothing to do with me and everything to do with Karen and her dysfunction, but it still hurts to have tangible evidence that my unobtrusive physical presence in a public space upset someone so much that they put up actual signs to let me know that I’m not welcome in their neighborhood.
And so the question of who is allowed to occupy public space in the United States remains contested. What else is new? I suppose the pandemic has lent the issue an extra degree of anxiety for many people, myself included.
None of that is possible now, so I’ve taken to sitting in my car with the windows cracked open. I can usually tolerate only about an hour of this before I get overheated or have to use the bathroom or something, but it’s still good to get out of the house and soak in some Vitamin D once or twice a week.
There’s a small street next to my apartment building with a lot of trees, so it’s possible to sit there quietly in the shade and not be bothered by pedestrians or passing traffic. Unfortunately, there was a heat wave two weeks ago, and one day it got so hot that I had to turn the car on to run the air conditioning. I dislike air conditioning, which always makes me feel like I’m catching a cold for some reason. On this day it was 95° in the shade, though, so air conditioning felt like less of a luxury and more of a necessity. I turned the car off again after about five minutes and didn’t think too much about it.
I was working on a deadline and super caught up in what I was writing, but I eventually noticed a woman in her late forties standing on the sidewalk and staring at me. I turned on the car, rolled down the window, and asked if she was okay.
She told me that idling your car is illegal in Philadelphia, and that she was going to call the police. When I (politely) asked what the fuck she was on about, she kept repeating the same three sentences about how idling your car is illegal, how it’s bad for the environment, and how she’s going to call the police if I don’t stop.
This woman was standing outside of a three-story, seven-bedroom townhouse in 100° weather while wearing a cardigan over a sweater, meaning that she hadn’t skimped on her own air conditioning. Despite having a Black Lives Matter sign prominently displayed in her yard, she was threatening to call the police on me for parking on her street.
(Before you ask, the answer is yes.)
Just to be clear, Philadelphia’s anti-idling law only applies to large and diesel-fueled vehicles, and it’s aimed at preventing industrial pollution. I will readily admit that me idling for five minutes while blasting the air conditioning in my Honda Fit wasn’t great for the environment, but it was obvious that this lady wasn’t really concerned about trees and plants. Anti-harassment laws in Philadelphia are very specific about there needing to be “overtly malicious intent” “after dark” for someone to be charged with loitering (I know this because it ended up becoming a major concern of the city’s BLM movement), so this woman must have waited and watched me until she saw me doing something that she could use as an excuse to threaten to call the police. Yikes.
Still, I get that it can be creepy for someone to sit in their car on your street and type for an hour once or twice a week. Most people would shrug it off as “Well, it’s a pandemic, we’re all doing the best we can,” but some people are sensitive. And that’s okay! It must be difficult to live in a three-story, seven-bedroom house with a back garden and not be able to just, like, move to another room.
So I apologized, told the woman I understood, thanked her for her concern, and moved the car to a different street a few blocks over. I felt weird about the whole thing, so I haven’t so much as taken a walk in the neighborhood since then. Instead of sitting in my car, I drive to a park on the other side of the neighborhood and sit there. I feel guilty about being outside in a public place during a pandemic, but whatever. I’m far from the only person there, and everyone wears masks. We’re all doing the best we can, you know?
Now, more than two weeks later, this woman has put up enormous anti-idling signs on the telephone poles at the intersections outside both ends of her street. What this means is that she went out of her way to design these signs and get them printed, and she also went through the trouble of going downtown to stand in line at City Hall and apply for the permit to post them. Wow.
I can totally see how this might not be about me, but I doubt it. The signs specify that idling is not allowed on that particular street, for one thing, and I’ve never actually seen anyone idling on that stretch of road. There are only about seven or eight townhouses on either side of the street before it dead-ends into a larger road at either end, so it’s unlikely that there were other incidents – it’s just too small of an area.
There’s no way to know for sure, of course, but what I think happened is that this woman doesn’t like it that there’s open street parking on her block, or that just anyone can park in front of her large and expensive townhouse. Street parking on that block is almost always totally full, and there’s a lot of traffic on the larger roads, so it’s not like I was sitting alone in a solitary car right in front of her house and being weird. Still, she probably pays more than three thousand dollars a month on property tax alone, and she has the right not to have to look at people who are less wealthy than her in her urban and densely-populated neighborhood in West Philadelphia.
I’ve read any number of opinion pieces and editorials about “Karen,” but I get the feeling that people might be overthinking things a bit. Putting the delicate issue of mental health aside, some people are just crazy, and I think what frustrates everyone so much about the Karens of the world is their entitlement in assuming that their particular brand of antisocial behavior is not just normative but an actual service to the community.
Obviously – obviously! – I’m not going to do anything in response, but I can’t help but be a little upset. I know this has nothing to do with me and everything to do with Karen and her dysfunction, but it still hurts to have tangible evidence that my unobtrusive physical presence in a public space upset someone so much that they put up actual signs to let me know that I’m not welcome in their neighborhood.
And so the question of who is allowed to occupy public space in the United States remains contested. What else is new? I suppose the pandemic has lent the issue an extra degree of anxiety for many people, myself included.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 02:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-22 07:20 pm (UTC)I am so sorry you had to deal with this asswipe. Also feel you hard on trying to get out of the house to get shit done during this bullshit year. You'd think people would be more understanding, but I guess some people still think they're the center of the universe and how dare others intrude. Sigh...
I'm also cackling over this Karen putting signs everywhere, because WOW. As someone who briefly worked at a shipping/printing retail shop, people legit do this shit more than should be deemed reasonable. Also she'd get along great with the person down the street from me who keeps putting non-police-issued speedometers on the telephone pole near them. I swear those are up for a week then come down for a month... then are up again for a week before coming down again.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-23 01:37 pm (UTC)That is wild, wtf. Like really, that is some next-level nosy neighbor bullshit.
I was really upset about this whole thing yesterday, but I woke up this morning and decided to own it. Maybe I will become a neighborhood cryptid. People can tell urban legends about how they caught sight of the strange person sitting by the side of the road and typing. My friend says if they look up and you meet their eyes you'll finish your WIP.
Slightly off topic, but back when print stores were more common I remember that they always used to be staffed by the coolest people. I always wondered where they came from and how they all knew each other, but it makes since that a lot of them would have been art school students and graduates.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 04:13 am (UTC)That is a *piercingly* accurate assessment of The Karen, though.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 01:46 pm (UTC)Let me admit something a little creepy: Because I know this woman's address, I googled it, which is how I found out how many bedrooms the house has and how much the annual property tax is. This is all a matter of public records, apparently, and I didn't even have to click on anything from the main search results page. What I was looking for in the heat of the moment was the property's square footage so that I could calculate how much air conditioning it would take to keep a giant house like that chilly in the summer (the answer: a whole lot of air conditioning), but I ended up finding this woman's name as well.
It probably won't surprise you to learn that she's signed a bunch of petitions, which Google used to link her name to her address. Google also informed me that she teaches at a Betsy DeVos style private religious school that people can send their kids to if they don't want their children interacting with the wrong sort of people. Black Lives Matter indeed.
Still, getting all of this information about this woman (who is definitely not a public figure) from a three-second Google search for her address was super upsetting, and that more than anything calmed me right the fuck down after the encounter. It was chilling, you might say.
I'm telling you this because I remember that the two of us have had a few exchanges concerning how much information you (in a general sense of "you") share about yourself online, and the benefits of remaining as anonymous as possible as opposed to working aggressively to create your own online profile so that the information you put out about yourself has a higher SEO index that anything other people might post about you. I ended up taking the latter route, but I 120% respect and support people who keep various aspects of their identity separate and anonymous. This incident forced me to question how possible to is to remain pseudonymous online, and it was upsetting.
So the roundabout point I'm trying to make is: Holy hell is it difficult to be a writer (or any other sort of creative) and find a functioning balance between putting your work out into the world and compromising your privacy and sense of security in being able to present yourself as anything other than a brand.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 07:30 pm (UTC)Keeping yourself hidden is so difficult. I mean, I have gotten a little bit less careful about it now that I'm not actively reviewing video games (the shit I got via emails for not liking one FF game -- and I'm sure you can guess which one -- is a big reason my paranoia lasted as long as it has), but if I ever do get published and have to do the Visible Author Brand thing, I'm going to end up creating a whole "me" that is that author-self under that pen name just to make extra sure the SEO is thoroughly seasoned. I know I can't do a complete and perfect wall, but yikes. (At the end of the day I care more about keeping this ID separate from my wallet name than I would an author persona, just because, well, video game fanboys--and I use the word advisedly--are just fucking like that and I play online games with this handle.)
no subject
Date: 2020-08-29 01:51 pm (UTC)My main participation in the gaming "community" is through Reddit, where I post questions (and sometimes answers) about gameplay and collectibles. I've been doing this since about 2013, and every year I delete my account and start a new one. Not because anything bad has actually happened to me, but because the fact that it could is so tangible.
*deep sigh*
no subject
Date: 2020-09-01 05:23 pm (UTC)People are just so exhausting.