What is embarrassing to You?

Mom and Dad and Grama, continue with caution.

My bag is pretty heavy when I get on a train.  For sake of ease, I put everything I carry in there, even my computer and carry-on daypack.  Usually I can manage just fine lifting the bag three feet above my head and onto the luggage rack over the seats.  Last night, taking the night train from Santiago to Madrid, I could not manage.  As the bag is lifted over my head, I could feel myself start to lean into an arch I would never recover from.  Thankfully a guy in another seat helped me regain my balance and lift the bag to the rack.  I laughed as the mission was accomplished; no sense in being embarrassed about not being able to do something on your own.  But I am a bit flustered about the woman sitting in the seat just below where I have placed my bag. 

As I am lifting my bag, I realize that my shirt has come up over the roll of fat cleverly disguised by my pants, and as I am basically standing in the row of her seat, her head is...a foot from my midsection.  I know that my belly is pinched and red from the drawstring of my brown, cotton Capri pants and indented from the day’s wear, but if I let go of the bag to pull down my shirt, the bag will topple onto the woman below.  Also, I had been walking all day in the drawstring pants.  They are perfect for a day’s touristing but often the drawstring comes loose throughout the day and I have to retie it, which I did not think to do before getting on the train.  So the drawstring is loose, making my pants fall ever so impolitely.  Now, the pants don’t fall down my backside; I have a Latino ass and she is not easily bypassed by cotton clothing.  No.  I am PRETTY SURE, and there is no way I can be completely sure, but I am pretty sure that the lady sitting in her seat as I lifted my bag saw the very tip of my lady whiskers inches from her face.

Oh, yes.

As I am getting settled in my seat, I take off my rain jacket, which I have been wearing all day during the Santiago drizzles.  Bright purple, the thin, foldable jacket is about ten years old; I bought it when I was a deckhand for a cruise ship in Alaska on the Inside Passage because it packs so well.  But it has decided that this is its last trip.  The lining that makes it waterproof has disintegrated and flaked all over my clothes underneath, but ESPECIALLY on my shoulders where my pack rubs.  It looks like hair dander, but a DISTURBING amount of hair dander.  Imagine you are a starring in a winter film scene with that fake snow dropped on you to look like real snow but it never melts.  Yeah, that kind of mess.  And the woman sitting next to me notices, and I THINK I see her recoil in disgust.  It takes a whole slew of coping skills to surmount the 30-second adolescent moment I have thinking that she and her partner are talking about me in a language they know I cannot understand: “Did you see the dandruff on her shoulders?  I wonder if I can change seats.  It’s like that fake snow that never melts. Haa haaa haaa haaa.”

Given almost falling with a heavy bag on a full train of people watching you as I flash my overweight belly, inadvertently flashing pubes to an innocent, bystanding woman, or PERCEIVED unmanageable dander, it’s the dander that is most embarrassing.  More embarrassing than getting caught by a taxi driver while in the ever-so-slight-lean to the right so as to fart on a hard surface. 

So to put them in order, with one being the MOST embarrassing:

1.       Another woman disdaining your personal hygiene;

2.       Getting caught farting by a stranger; and THEN

3.       Another woman knowing that you go commando.