I was walking down 9th Street just now, coming back from lunch (I know, and: waffle, two eggs over medium, matzoh ball soup, mint tea, because I’m getting a cold), and I realized that I automatically do this thing when I want to avoid people that I learned to do when I was young and spent lots of time in iffy neighborhoods. (In this case, there were a bunch of drunk guys who were bugging girls walking by and I totally knew they were going to ask me for a cigarette or something and I’d be totally annoyed.) This is: when you don’t want people to pay attention to you, you do this sort of junkie thing where you keep rubbing your nose? Nobody wants to talk to people who are touching their noses. The nose is basically just one step up from the butt, in terms of things people don’t want to think about you touching. This is surprising since we look at noses all day and don’t find them terribly objectionable visually. So if you get a little hunched over, and particularly if you are smoking, and you sort of rub your nose and you shake your head a little bit like you are in your own private world or you are a bit doped up, no one will even look at you directly, or speak to you.

This tactic actually even works when you are holding a cigarette, which is counterintuitive, because cigarettes are always an invitation to an interaction. Yes: no one has ever, ever asked me for a cigarette while I am touching my nose.

There is also the other tactic, utilized by my friend Tracy when she was a waitress in Oakland and she’d come home at 2 a.m. with lots of tips: she’d put her purse under her sweater to pretend she was pregnant and then she’d walk down the middle of the street singing really loudly. That works too, on similar/differing principles, just not as well for men.