Golf interlude: Things I've heard on the bus

Time for another installment of "Things that I overheard on the bus."

• A couple of weeks ago I was riding home from work. The guy behind me was talking on the phone for most of the ride. At some point he mentioned that he had spent his day in court. Now, I'm still naive about who has to go to court. With all of my attorney friends I assume that people who go to court are lawyers or potential jurors. It turns out that when you ride a Seattle bus this is not necessarily the case. How did I figure out that this citizen was in court because he had done something wrong?

"Now the guy is saying that I pulled a knife on him"
"Yeah, it's total bulls***"
"Yeah, because if I had pulled a knife everyone in the store would have died."

I nearly choked on my tongue when he said that, mainly because I would pay money to see his attorney's reaction if he actually said that to a prosecutor. It would have been great. In a terrifying "this guy is riding the bus" way.

• The other amusing thing I overheard was not, in fact, on a bus. It was at a bar while I watched the Redskins lose to the Giants. As the game finished one of the waitresses pulled aside the owner to explain why she wasn't going to be at work the next day:

Waitress: I'm going to be late tomorrow. I have to be in court.
Owner: Why do you have to be in court?
W: You'll totally laugh, it's such a joke.
O: [waiting, not expecting to laugh]
W: I got charged with DUI a few weeks ago. Get this: I blew 0.083. I was only .3 over!
O: [Kind of shocked]
W: I know! Isn't it total BS?
O: Um, but you were drunk.
W: Not really. I was only .3 over!
O: But you were legally drunk. Why the hell were you driving?
W: No, you don't get it, I was only 0.083. That's barely over the limit. I'm sure it'll get dismissed.
O: [Fighting urge to point out that small numbers sometimes do matter.]

Weclome to Seattle!

This is why I was at work late tonight

I'll laugh at a lot of things. I smiled when my boss turned her laptop around and showed this clip to everyone at a meeting late this afternoon. But everyone else pretty much lost their sh*t. Rather than finishing the meeting so we could go home everyone loaded up YouTube so they could watch this again. And again. And then they watched the various derivatives. For 20 minutes. Even people who were participating in the meeting via phone got into the action. It was brutal. By the time we got down to bidness it was 5:30. Not that I had anything to do.

(Sadly, I didn't. I just hate missing the last express bus to my neighborhood.)

(Oh, and this is clearly a better video than the original.)

The fake druggies on the bus

One of the problems with uptight Seattlites is that no one will stand up to obnoxious people (they probably go home and blog about it rather than doing something). The buses here are often filled with young kids full of braggadocio who talk loudly about who they are having sex with or what drugs they are doing. I had a wonderful experience today sitting in front of three kids who, other than a few extra piercings, look like 95% of the other kids in Seattle... white, nattily dressed in an Urban Outfitters kind of way, probably the sons and daughters of two Microsoft engineers.

Anyways, here are a few of the gems from the conversation. I actually wrote them down:

• Everyone was referred to by a nickname. But what struck me was how obviously contrived the nicknames were: Insomnia, Blue, Two-tone (or Tu-tone), Ashtray. Except for poorly written Saturday morning tv shows o one has nicknames like that. Real nicknames are ones that the nicknam-ee don't really like. Dickey. Shitty. Gonz. Chazz. Goose. These were the nicknames I knew of in college (Dickey was mine), and no one was really that jazzed about having them (I certainly wasn't). But no one earns Ashtray... they sit around thinking about it and make a declaration "I will henceforth be known as Ashtray."
  
• "He's better when he's on meds or on crack." One girl actually said this. While I doubt they know anyone who has actually used crack, they are missing something. No one is better on crack. The term "crackhead" is not a compliment for a reason.
• They were shocked that undercover cops looked "hella, hella normal." Um, yeah. That's why they are undercover. And this is Seattle. No "hella"s please.
  
• All the kids were talking about how they wouldn't snitch if picked up by the cops. One actually said they would rather do 2-3 years in jail than snitch on their friends who were using drugs. Maybe this is true, but I'm sure that mom and dad's lawyers would convince them otherwise. Or, hours 1 through 5 in prison. I'm guessing they wouldn't make the two years.
  
• Right before they got off the bus the dude in the group was telling a story about his friend who got jumped because "They knew he wouldn't do anything." Apparently, "they" left him alone because he was from the "west side of Phoenix." Um, since when does that make you hard? Google "Phoenix west side". When the first entry is "Westside Urology", well, you're neighborhood can't be that tough. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing it's no Bronx, Anacostia, South-side Chicago, East L.A., etc.
  

I smell strongly of flowers

Apartment 403 was a touch musty when we first moved in, so I bought one of those plug-in air freshener thingamajigs. That scent turned out to be pretty overpowering at times, so I don't leave it plugged in all the time. Apparently some of the scented oil leaked out onto the body of the device, because as I went to plug it in my hand came away covered in a thin layer of artificial flower smell.

This is going to be a complete disaster, because this scent seems impervious to traditional cleansing methods. I am currently emitting (albeit sweetly pleasant) odors at long range. I may need to wear gloves to work tomorrow.

And since I have no better context to work this picture into the blog, here's the very pretty tree I look at every morning from my bus stop. Seattle has a strange spring... it's already very green, but the flowering trees all seem to bloom quite early, well before the other deciduous flora in the city. Sadly, the wind and rain knocks off most of the blossoms once they are out.


Yuck. My hand is starting to make me ill.

Things that are annoying me

I promise more substantive posts this weekend, but as Huan pointed out its tough to blog when life is routine. To tide you over, here are some things that have been annoying me recently:

1. My desk chair. While living in my old apartment I struggled to find a desk chair that had no wheels. Finally I bought a simple chair from Crate and Barrel made for dinner tables. It worked great on the hardwood floors. Now the chair is on a carpeted floor, and it is miserable. I need wheels.
2. Noodles. I love noodles. I remember pestering my parents to go to a wholly mediocre place in Springfield called the Pasta Peddler because I knew they would have pasta, and with a witty name like that the food would probably be good too (I was 10, give me a break). Now I work in the International District, so my choices during lunch are Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and wholly mediocre "other." Thus for 5 weeks my lunches have consisted of pho, ramen, soba, lo mein, etc. And my backup "quick/easy" dinner is spaghetti. So I'm sick of noodles.
   
3. My cellphone. First, it takes at least 15 seconds between pushing a button and getting a reaction. Second, people keep calling me at 6:45am thinking I'm on the East Coast.
4. Buses. Trains only go where there are tracks. Buses, at least in Seattle, seem to go wherever they want. Before 7:00pm the #2 bus basically takes me door to door. After 7:00pm the #2 doesn't come within 2 miles of my office. Although neither the King County Metro site or the street placards inform you of this fact. Buses also change numbers with seeming randomness; imagine if you got on the Red Line, and two stops later you found out you were on the Orange. It's disconcerting.
   

Pants free edition!

I fanatically avoided the bus in back in DC. In all my years there I can only recall riding the bus twice: once taking the shuttle from Greenbelt to BWI (and back), and once taking the Circulator into Georgetown. They weren't bad experiences, but both trips were during off-hours, thus they were uncrowded and generally pleasant. I've been taking the bus in Seattle because A) my job gives me an unlimited free pass B) the cab drivers don't know where anything is and C) it seems to be the cool-kids thing to do.

Well, I had my first "man without pants nearly falling into my lap" experience last night. Technically he was wearing pants, they were just around his ankles. It goes without saying that he had not recently showered.

I'm taking a different route tonight.