My Exciting Anecdote for the Day

[laleia]

I'm so proud of this story, I've both Tweeted and Facebooked it, and the only reason this is going here instead of on my travel blog is because my mother worries a lot, and I'd rather not add one more thing to her long list of worries ...

Anyway, the reason I have an lj is so I can do things like dissecting ~why I feel the way I feel~ at length and not care whether anyone else is going to find this boring. That's why this goes under a cut!


So Seoul has a lot of nightclub promoters whose jobs are to wander around shouting, "Nightclub! Nightclub!" at people and try to convince them to come to their nightclub. These promoters are pretty annoying but mostly they just talk at you and if you, like me, don't look obviously Western and don't speak English in front of them, they give up on you pretty quickly.

Today I was getting dinner with two of my coworkers. We'd just come from Coldstone's where a nightclub promoter had stood outside the large glass window and tried to convince us to go to his nightclub (zeroing in on us because we included visible Westerners in our group).

So we were already annoyed.

Then, to get home we had to pass by an intersection where different nightclub promoters like to congregate. When they started hawking their wares at us, my other two coworkers immediately split and ran ahead. I walked at a more sedate pace because,

1) I hate running,
2) There was no guarantee the promoters would think I was with their party and/or interested, and
3) I didn't really care if they yelled in my ear.

Of course then, this guy who'd approached my coworkers (causing them to run in the first place) turned to me, tried to convince me to go to his nightclub, and then grabbed my wrist. It wasn't a hard/painful grip or anything, but it wasn't a grip I could easily break from. And then he tried to tug me (presumably in the direction of the nightclub).

I reacted by karate-chopping his wrist.

He let go with a cry (I'd like to think it was a cry of pain, but I am realistic about my strength or lack thereof; more likely it was a cry of surprise), and with this confused look on his face.

I scowled, and turned around to catch up with my friends.

This ends my exciting anecdote about how I stood up for myself.

I am very proud of myself because this is probably the first time in my life I have ever reacted to a situation where my reaction matched up to what I wished I could have done afterward. I've been fortunate in my life to never have experienced a serious crisis or dangerous situation (and hopefully never will for the remainder of my life), but I've always been the kind of person who is better at coming up with witty retorts and logical courses of action three days later.

My reaction today gives me hope that if I have quick reflexes and good instincts. Or something.

Granted on a danger scale of 1 to 10, today registered at maybe a 0.5, but I've always struck myself as the kind of person who would freeze at that critical moment (in any situation that involves interacting with real live people, I always do better on practice tests, be it practice interviews, mock teaching exercises, or counseling roleplay), and this is proof that my instincts are to be trusted.

And that's why I am pleased.

Comments

[avanti-90.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! Sounds like a good reason to be pleased.
Also, nightclub promoters? I've never heard of them before, but they sound incredibly irritating.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Someone puts their hands on you, you can put your hands on them.

[juxtaposie.livejournal.com]

IAWTC