karate in action

At midnight tonight walking up 8th avenue looking at the ground listening to my iPod thinking about myself (which is what I usually think about anyway) a guy about my age shaved head with a hat on stumbled into my path and lightly grabbed my forearm. He wobbled back to a semi-upright stance as I looked up, stepped back and twisted my arm out of his grasp with a twist that made it seem like as if he had almost never touched me. I turned my arm so that when bending my elbow up (imagine doing a bicep curl) my forearm pulled at where his fingers were grasped. While in motion I said clearly, calmly and with an authority that sounded odd in my head, "don't touch me." He looked at me, now with a distance between us and my arm closest to him held in a fighting position, and seemed to try to focus. I said, "what do you need?" Because in the nanosecond that I had taken to get in complete control of the situation, I saw that he was just a drunk guy, and wondered if he was okay or needed help.

He looked at me for a moment and said, "You gonna leave?"

I said "Yeah," and turned and continued up the street towards home.

After a few seconds, the adrenaline hit, and I thought "what the fuck was that?" and I also realized: I'm a motherfucking ninja.

** for the record I was in heels and a skirt at the time, so I'm a hot, feminist ninja