Having a child....?

One day in school, Yenn pulls me aside and whispers, "See that girl?" and points to a girl, who was partially blocked by the crowd of people streaming out of the lecture theatre.

"Yea, so?" I reply offhandedly.

"That girl is in one of my tutorials, and I can't figure out one thing...

Can you tell me whether she's pregnant or not?"

Blink. Blink blink blink. I try to get a better view of the girl above the crowd, and lo and behold, she does have a pretty, *cough* impressively bulging abdomen. Which could have been a baby, but yet......

"Er, she could be, I guess, but...... I donno, it looks a little....... off?"

Ok, later we both reckoned that she probably wasn't pregnant, because there wasn't much chance that Moe would have hired her and allowed her to do her course if she was that pregnant, but then, if she wasn't......

Then all that stomach was just pure fat?

*Pregnant Pause* [ok bad pun there...]

But I felt I had to make a comment, especially after reading ms beautifuk's post on the ugly Singaporean student. [her main point is that people from our local universities are particularly lacking in courtesy] I would like to point out that in this particular instance, I was not quite discourteous, but rather... confused.

Here's another incident that happened to me. I was on the MRT, going almost from one end of the island to another, and I was reading my book for most of the journey. [NOT to try avoiding those who needed my seat]

As I was almost approaching my journey, I looked up bleary-eyed from my book, and I saw a pregnant woman in front of me. I was about to get up, when something stopped me.

Suddenly, it hit me that the woman could have been fat.

Because I don't know why, she had a bulging stomach all right, but it didn't look like a pregnant stomach, like a little... off or something? Some deep womanly instinct, I suppose you could call it that, told me it wasn't quite right anyway...

So here's the dilemma now:

1) I assume she's fat, and keep my seat. People brand me an insensitive, uncaring, selfish bastard.
2) I assume she's pregnant, and offer her my seat. She's actually fat, and she slaps me hard in the face.

How da af was I supposed to figure this out?? Nowadays maternity clothes look so chic, they look better than normal wear in some cases, so you can't judge pregnancy by how much the dress resembles a potato sack. [not only that, but I also hear they have jeans for pregnant women.] Neither can you judge by how haggard the mother looks, because of all the spa stuff expectant mothers can go to now, highly publicized by Zoe Tay.

Elderly and handicapped are easy, you can tell them from a mile away. How then do you tell an expectant mother from a fat woman? (^^!)

Anyway, I took the coward's way out in the end. I stood up from my seat about 1 station away, and sort of edged my way through the crowd such that I cleared a path for the [maybe] pregnant woman to go straight to my seat if she wanted to. I figure this way, she can have the seat, with no undue embarrassment to me, if she wasn't pregnant.

So don't be too quick to judge me as insensitive, uncaring, etc etc..... Sorry, but I was really clueless in this case...... :p