gross guy, talking whales, and flowers
little thoughts 8
another week, another 3 thoughts to think about.
one. the gross guy
my anxiety was high yesterday. so high that i almost turned down a dodgers game with kevin, which is crazy, cuz my perfect night is in an arena watching sports i barely understand. and i love kevin.
i pushed past the anxiety and met kev at the game. i hoped it would help. then, we sat. 🤡
i’d forgotten how close together seats are at a baseball stadium, and how much you’d want your space to be shared with someone unproblematic. it’s worse than an airplane, honestly, because people can be gross and chatty and annoying and all the things you really don’t want your seat neighbor to be.
the second the game started, the guy next to me (seemingly a dodgers fan, cuz he was covered head to toe in LA gear) started ripping on the team. our team. the dodgers. i was annoyed.
here’s where it escalates. a couple minutes in, he whips out — i kid you not — a WET jersey mike’s sandwich. like, dripping in sauces. then spent the next ~10 minutes eating the first half with sauce covered fingers, never taking a second to stop talking. how he did both, i’ll never know.
i was repulsed. so much so that i opened my texts with kev and showed him this cry for help:
he said we could switch seats the next time we all stood up. i was even-more-anxiously waiting for it when a woman walks by juggling tons of food, sees sauce finger man, and literally asks him if he wants a napkin.
to which, with food overflowing from his mouth, he says, “no thanks, i’m saving it for later.”
we switched seats which helped a bit, but it was a long night next to sauce man. he went on to consistently shit on both teams, interrupt kevin and i to give unsolicited baseball opinions, and of course — devour the second half of his sandwich.
the first thing i told cam when i got home was about this man. it’s funny to me that he will never know that because of him, i have a new definition of “repulsed” — and his face will live in my mental dictionary next to the word.
as always with little thoughts, there’s no big learning. except, please. i beg of you. remember that you are not the center of the universe. and take the napkin.
two. talking whales
remember how eerily quiet the world felt during the heat of the panny? it was bizarre, how fast a boisterous world became nearly silent.
one of my favorite things about it was learning about whales in “the year the earth changed” — a documentary narrated by the one and only, david attenborough.
researches found that in southeast alaska, whales were communicating at an increased rate because they could finally hear each other. the lack of cruise ship noise meant that it was 25x quieter underwater.
that will never leave me — the thought of the world getting still enough for whales to finally hear each other.
there’s a metaphor in there, but i’ll stay quiet and let you find it.