Wednesday, October 14, 2009

All I Really Want is A Little Bit

Most cities will list museums and landmarks in their tourism brochures but they never list the true gift the city has to offer...People Watching. Any city worth it's salt will provide quality people watching opportunities.

But I haven't come to tell you what you already know. People watching isn't the order of the day. But it is the predecessor to another fun hobby of mine, snippet hunting. What's snippet hunting? It's people watching but you engage the sense of listening. The goal is to hear the most random bit of a conservation, or snippet, completely out of context and stop listening before it can in any way make sense. The goal is find something that is stand alone funny and ridiculous, maybe because of it's non sequitur-ness.

I came upon a jewel yesterday in Chicago on my way into a Trader Joe's. Two 30 something women were talking and on said to the other:

Carol said she's kick me in the stomach if I took her baby name

That my friends is a quality snippet. I didn't need to hear anything after or what came before. I hurried into the market to enjoy the snippet while I calculated the unit price of apples.

INSIDE MY HEAD: There's more in this bag but I believe this bag costs less per apple...then again are the apples bigger in this bag?...Doesn't my hotel have apples in the lobby for free?...kicked in the stomach...HA!

You can pretty much have a ball in any city. All you need is time, a way to get around and ears (in many cases one ear will do)

The thing that stuck with me the most is that even white yuppie housewives in Chicago don't take any shorts. Chicago is no joke.

Let's just hope Carol has her baby first.

2 comments:

Deana said...

A guy at a former job once mentioned that he often heard me saying weird and disturbing things while I walked through the hall and talked on my cell phone. So after that, I purposely dropped random conversational bombs when passing his office.

dwayneperkins said...

Nice. But to quote my mother, "that's how lies get out..."