It’s been a pretty busy week and a bit, full of wandering around northern Mindanao on public buses, yet another recurrence of the dreaded brain-eating ear fungus, and correcting a spreadsheet with 50,000 names by hand. It is really really really my goal, however, to average a blog post at least every other day. So I’m going to work on that.

I almost got pickpocketed yesterday, for the first time ever. Well, the first time that I know about, that is. I've managed to escape from much more pickpocket heavy places -- Rome, Paris, Prague -- without any trouble. A young man sat down next to me on the jeepney, and managed to get his hand all the way into the messenger bag that was on my lap before I noticed what was going on. Fortunately, nothing valuable is very easy access in this bag – my wallet and ipod and everything are all buried in an inside pocket, and my laptop is too big to pull out.

I was pretty rattled about this, especially because my bag was closed and on my lap in front of me. It made me realize two things:

1. My instincts are not all wrong, just because I’m in the Philippines. When the guy first sat down next to me, I felt like something was wrong, but stifled it. I noticed that he squeezed in right next to me even though there was a space with more room on the other bench, and that his backpack was almost on top of my lap (he used it to cover the arm that was reaching into my bag). I’ve gotten used to just ignoring my instincts about the appropriate amount of physical space and behavior in public spaces, because most of them are not operative here. In this case, however, I would have caught him much earlier if I’d paid attention to my feeling of wrong-ness.
2. Victims’ guilt complex is for real. After I caught him and pushed his hand out of my bag, I felt embarrassed. Which is so weird, right? I mean, not too embarrassed to move to the other bench and check my bag to see if he’d taken anything. But it took me a minute to collect myself to even do that, and I didn’t do anything else other than glare at him. And he just gave me this big Cheshire cat grin, like, “What?” I think I probably did the only thing that could be done in this situation, actually. What was I going to do – ask the other jeepney riders to make a citizen’s arrest on the basis of an alleged, attempted pickpocketing? But if it had been a situation that called for some more drastic or attention-calling reaction, I would have had to make myself do it. I’m not exactly shy about calling people out when I think they’re doing something wrong, so what does this say about how most people must feel when they’re victims of crime?