Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
die vielen leute
It’s easy to forget what a cross-section looks like. I never saw it in the office; there, I saw retirees, the gainfully employed, and their children. This is not a true cross-section. When you spend your life shuttling between home, work, and a relatively upscale supermarket, you’re insulated from society at large.
As docs, we see something close to a cross-section in our emergency rooms. But in the ER, it’s all too simple to fall back on old prejudices. This is not what the world is. Normal people don’t get (fill in the blank).
Jaw fractures, for example. With rare exception (we ENTs say to one another), normal people don’t break their jaws. Assholes who pick fights, they’re the ones who break their jaws. Or, more properly speaking, and one of the rare cases where the passive voice really does make sense: they get their jaws broken for them.
We did the DMV thing today: California license and registration for both of us and our vehicles. Folks waiting at the DMV truly do represent a cross-section of our neighborhood. Young mothers with their toddlers . . . two three-year-olds make an on-the-spot friendship, and when one kid’s mom gets called to a window, the girl waves and says, “Bye!” The other girl says, “Bye!” And because neither learned when to stop, the ‘byes’ continue for the next two minutes.
An old man stands behind my wife, talking nonstop in a perfectly ordinary conversational tone. A sign of the times: I don’t assume he’s crazy (yet), I check his ears for wireless first. Nope, no wireless — he’s nuts. He’s not holding a number, and no one bothers to tell him he’ll need a number before the DMV workers will talk to him.
Students in dreadlocks rib each other to pass the time . . . a Middle Eastern man insists to the gal taking pictures that he’s such a great driver, he didn’t need to read the handbook . . . an overweight white dude huffs his oxygen . . . a dad brings in his teenage son for his first written test. The woman taking my forms finds out I’m a doctor and chats me up about her panic attacks when she takes benadryl at night. (So don’t take benadryl at night.) Young people who seem to be compos mentis walk up to windows expecting to be seen. No number? See ya later!
The masses titillate me/scare me/bore me. But even when they bore me, I can’t resist looking, peeking into their lives. I can’t resist listening in.
Is there a word for that, to be bored and yet feel compelled to look?
D.
Is there a word for that, to be bored and yet feel compelled to look?
If there isn’t, there should be.
Hmm.
People watching is fascinating. I love doing it. You get *great* character elements from strangers. I think we’re all slightly curious, too, aren’t we? About other people’s lives, who they are, where they’re coming from?
Well, I am, anyway. 🙂
The way the French use “ennui” comes close. Not merely boredom, but irrritation bordering on melancholy.
DMV and vehicle registration is the bigggest hustle
Pathological Eavesdropping
being a writer?