My coworker Kyle and I were walking back to office after lunch on Thursday, a Streetwise vendor (dressed, somewhat oddly, in a baby blue-and-white basketball uniform) stuck a paper out towards me and said, "How about it, guy."

"Sorry, man."

"How about you, baby," he said to the person right behind me. Baby? I glanced to see who was behind me.

"Kyle, did that Streetwise vendor just call you baby?"

"Yes. At least it wasn't 'big guy'. I hate when they call me that."

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Earlier in the week, Erica and I were walking past the playground at Swift School. A car was stopped in the street. It was a big seventies muscle car with big tires and those rims that spin. (I don't know my seventies muscle cars well enough to know what it was, but Erica later said, "let's call it an Impala. You know, because of the song. 'Wanna be a -- baller, shot caller/Twenty inch blades -- on the Impala.'")

If we hadn't noticed the rims before, it was highlighted for us by a woman standing by the playground wearing a matching set of baby-blue terry-cloth hot pants and too-tight shirt. "Spin, motherfuckas, spin!" she enthused.

"Anyway," she continued, "it's 555-1212 [only she was giving some real number here and the guy in the car was putting it into his cell phone] and my name is Therese."

"Did we just witness a pick-up based on cool rims?" I asked Erica when we got a little farther down the street.

"Yup. And did you notice that she gave her name after her number? And then she pointed out her baby who was playing on the playground."

"That's the one woman in a hundred that makes guys think it's worth shouting things at every woman on the street because she's the one that'll answer back."
[I just showed this to Erica to fact-check it ("I think her name was Therese, not Crystal") and she said, "I think I saw that guy yesterday driving down the same street. I should give him my number." "What!" "Sorry, baby, it's the rims."]