{.}

On the T on my way home last night there were two young women in enormous parkas. One was doing something that was a little too subtle to really qualify as a pole dance per se. The other was wearing headphones and vocalizing very loudly, monotonally, and repetitively with a raunchy song on repeat.*

It sounded a bit like this:

Workin’ that thing, workin’ that thing, workin’ that thing
[repeat a whole bunch]
Workin’ that thing, workin’ that thing, workin’ that thing
[repeat a whole bunch more]
[repeat even more than that]
Do it on the teacher’s desk!
Deeper, huh, deeper!
. . .Why is everybody on the whole train starin’ at me?

On a sidewalk later, I overtook a couple who were in much more of a sauntering mood than I was, given the -14C temperature.

Man: The robots are monotheistic.
Woman (Making what seemed-like a good faith effort to feign interest, but mostly just sounding cold): Mmmm.
Man: But the humans are polytheistic
Woman: Mm-hmm.

Umm, maybe that was funnier if you heard it. The guy really sounded pretty earnest, not to say proselytizing.

* * *

So, people have been having interesting conversations hereabouts from which I’ve been perforce disbarred due to deadlines and such.

On weirdnesses:
I should probably stress that the publication was just in the contest section of a childrens’ magazine. Also, I would like to retroactively change weird thing #1 (which everyone already knows about) to my enduring confusion about whether common English words (like “gesture”) are pronounced with a hard or soft “g.” And do I think it’s kind of weird that I wear earplugs so much (on the T, notably, which I have seen a few other people do) but a bit weirder that I spend quite so much time stressing about what other people think about it. Basically, I don’t want to turn into my dad, who’s been known to wander around in public swaddled like H.G. Wells’ “Invisible Man” and wearing a breath mask to boot, so signs of impending potential my-dad-like behavior cause angst. Finally, Miles, CAPTCHA is a Carnegie Mellon trademark for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and if your life hasn’t been plagued with these things, I am quite envious.

On buying nothing for a whole day at a time:
I hope this is sort of implicit in any discussion of new year’s resolutions, but I’m not trying to urge my choices on anyone else. Like Ezra, I like buying things. I don’t intend to stop, or indulge in self-flagellation on that account. There are many cases in which I feel really good about buying things, especially when by doing so I demonstrate my economic support for values and ventures that I want to promote. But I do want to be more conscious of my buying choices. I’m still debating whether to come clean in public about my other major finance-related New Year’s resolution, but suffice it to say for now that I used to buy things very reflexively. In exactly the same way that some folks console themselves by eating a half gallon of ice cream at a sitting or drinking to excess, I routinely used to go buy a pile of books or CDs — often a half-dozen or more — to cheer myself up. And ultimately, while it wasn’t as self-destructive as some forms of binging, it was still a behavior pattern with significant longterm adverse consequences.

*It turned out to be “Juicy” by Pretty Ricky. And I guess it’s officially a “thang,” not a “thing,” being worked (and “murked” and “twurked” and whatnot), but I transcribes it the way I hears it.

Posted in somerville, cambridge, personal. You may comment on this entry.