No. 1

He's wearing a navy baseball cap low over his face, a white Hanes tee beneath his black zip-up hoodie, light stone wash jeans, and black asics. I can hardly see his face because he hunches over a crossword in a puzzler book. He lifts his heel to secure the book when he writes an answer. He puts it back down when he thinks.

(This is the first installment of the PNP series.)

Boys and Girls

A Saturday night on public transportation is like a holding room for the club. I watched a group of four guys and a group of four girls in the station. The girls wore heels and bite-sized dresses, over which they folded their curls and arms to keep from freezing. One girl kept her right arm outstretched to find a better angle for her unceasing attempts at self-portraits of the group. The boys wore polos and passed around an Aquafina bottle filled with orange liquid. The girls eventually gave up on her arm-span and had one of the boys take the picture. It seemed that they were perfect together.

Only it turned out that they weren't together. Once we sat on the train, I saw that they were total strangers, except of course that their social lives had molded them to fit very well together. The conversation was dull and disconnected, and representatives of each group pretended to get to know the other while cracking camouflaged inside jokes to their counterparts.

"You guys all got nice shoes," said the boys.
"Thanks," said the girls. "Where are you guys going?"
"Where are you guys going?" Three boys mysteriously chuckled. Another round of orange liquid.
"We asked you first." The girls cackle.

It's like tennis, but funnier.

As I left South Station, I had a hard time discerning all the signs for the different train and bus lines. What I wanted was the exit, but I ended up activating an alarm trying to go backwards through the turnstile just in time for the boys to notice.

"Woah, wrong way!" said the loud one.
"Yeah, how embarrassing."
"You are the biggest loser - goodbye," he said, in a drunk and slightly boggled reality-TV reference. I decided not to engage. We all stepped onto the gargantuan escalator. Near the top, the loud boy had a sudden change of heart.
"I'm sorry," he said to me, feigning remorse. "I didn't mean to call you a loser. You're not the biggest loser." This was all part of the boys and girls game. His role was to throw insults at me through a charming smile until I simply couldn't resist any longer. But I don't like to play that game.
"No, I know," I replied.
"Oooh, so... Wait, are you saying I'm the biggest loser?"
"No." I replied, and our paths diverged toward our respective Saturday nights.

Wisdom from the Street

While this advice wasn't given directly to me, it is too good not to post. A homeless man told my friend Dahlia this last week at a train station:

"That train's not gonna come when you want it to, but it'll be right on time."

You're Too Kind

Life Alive

My little sister and I ate in the basement of a crunchy hippie restaurant last month. There was a woman eying us from across the room. Emily thought she was a psychic, and judging by her hanging shawls and stack of cards, I thought so too. She wore a headpiece with draping gold discs, something between a crown and a hat, like an African princess. It was a distracting thing to have in one's peripheral vision, and eventually I decided to ask her what she was about.

"Goddess card readings," she answered. "It's really fun - we just see what card you draw and talk about what it might mean for your life. I've been doing this for many years, and everyone gets just the right card." With two sisters in the middle of life crises, she had hit the jackpot.

She handed us the stack of cards. We both drew from the middle of the deck.
Emily uncovered Aphrodite, the goddess of Love.
For me, Oshun, goddess of Sensuality.
Two sisters, sixty possibilities, and this is what we get.
"Amazing that two sisters should draw this pair!" she remarked. "So... tell me what you think it means."

We were both silent. We didn't care what we thought; we wanted her to tell us. - Everything. I would have let her make all of my big decisions right then and there. But instead, she talked of self-love and hot baths and fresh-cut flowers. But the reading still produced my answers. It just happened to be that I already knew them.

Origami

I watched a girl about my age take a piece of patterned red paper out of her bag. It was the same size as a gum wrapper, but much denser. She began folding it, in half one way, then another, flipping and turning it in a entrancing rhythm of fold, crease, fold, crease. She knew the pattern well, so much that her field of attention picked up my staring.

"What are you making?" I asked, caught.
"A crane. If you make a thousand, you get a wish."
"Oh yeah, I think I've heard of that! How many do you have?"
"I think four hundred now."
"Have you been going a while?"
"About five months," she said, as she shaped the beak of the paper creature. "Do you want this one?"

Obviously I did. I thanked her profusely and examined it before tucking it in the pocket of my raincoat. It's beautiful, with the paper's bold colors intertwining along its creases, which are impeccable despite the nonchalance of the maker. I wondered about her 1000-crane wish as she walked up the stairs, her head tilted slightly to the left.

Profiles of Normal People in the Present Tense Explained

It occurred to me that many of the people I feature on my blog are eccentric. While eccentricity will always be the key to my heart, I'd like to share some accounts of people who are not so bold - people who blend in. This series will be called Profiles of Normal People in the Present Tense. Stay tuned!

Civil Disobedience

Freaky Friday

People hate cockroaches because they are creepy and scuttle around at the speed of light. But the last time I saw one, I had a thought: What if that is simply their response to seeing humans, which is the only time we see them? And if that's the case, what must they think of us?

"Gross! Humans! They scream and point and hop in place!"