Thursday, September 25, 2008

People

Apologies for the lack of pictures lately. It's just really hard to motivate to take pictures when wandering around taking pictures is not your forte. I like taking pictures of people I know and love. Jim likes taking pictures of people he knows and loves and also inanimate objects (doors and signs in particular) and also complete strangers. This is where we differ. So, during this time of long weekdays unpunctuated by work or people I know, there are no pictures to share.

But I can share experiences! I enjoy a blog: www.emilymagazine.com. Emily has a very dry sense of humor and shares her daily thoughts and experiences in NYC in a way that I find very intellectual and also hilarious (mostly). A couple of weeks ago, she posted a really funny description of the people who were sharing her space in one of NYC's public libraries and I thought to myself that I needed to make a point of remembering people who strike me as being annoying/interesting/intriguing/worth blogging about. It sounds easy, but I'm finding that because my work involves (or involved, rather) daily interactions with people who would fall into the "intersting/annoying/odd/freakish" category, I'm a little desensitized to those kinds of things. Even at my new main hangout, the laundromat, the people are pretty normal and boring and rather refined.

Fortunately, today's jaunt to the pharmacy provided some much needed annoying and strange people. The first (strange) was the guy with very few teeth and Crystal Gail length dreadlocks. I was standing behind him and was so entranced by his mammoth dreadlocks that I almost asked him how long it took to get them to such great lengths. But then the pharmacist brought him a bottle of some medicine and the guy drank the whole thing right there at the counter before handing it back and I decided that some questions are better left unasked and concentrated on trying not to say something about personal space to the other person (annoying) who had caught my attention. She was an older woman who got into the line behind me and immediately started tisking and huffing about having to wait. Not only that, but every time she tisked and huffed, she also shuffled forward a little bit so that she was practically tisking and huffing in my ear. And I could smell her hair, which is one of my sensitivities when it comes to people. If I can smell your not very clean hair, you are way in my personal space (I also am quite used to people being in my personal space, as previously mentioned people from work frequently lack the ability to recognize that I don't need to be nose to nose with them to have a conversation). Finally some people left and I could scuttle away from the space invader, but unfortunately I could still hear her and then the pharmacy couldn't find her prescription and she really started to kick off.

What I have learned from today is that I'm going to try not to be come a crotchety, impatient person and I'm going to wash my hair a lot throughout life.