~Monday~ I rode the #9 Greek Village Wolfline bus in this morning, on which I sat across from a thin Asian girl eating a piece of toast. It was unbuttered, and I can’t even begin to articulate how slowly she ate it. She must have chewed this one bite one hundred times.
It so reminded me of the several times I’ve watched my thin friend Susanne eat a piece of string cheese, which I find just excruciating. If I even bother to actually pull the strings of a piece of string cheese, I pull them in clumps of four or five at least. More commonly, though, I just eat the thing in bites.
Suzanne pulls each single strand at a time, which drives me absolutely nutso. When she eats pretzels, she picks off the salt crystals one at a time, too. I could just scream. If that’s what it takes, I will never be thin.
My only work meeting was at 1:00, and it was a director and an assistant director to talk about an upcoming, small publicity project about the grand opening of a refurbished computer lab. Both of the people I met with are fine human beings.
On the bus ride home, two girls who knew each other continued their conversation even though they were too far apart to have it without everyone around them hearing it. You can just picture me rubbing my palms together here, can’t you?
I’m going to go ahead and name this girl “The Biggest Loser,” as that’s what she clearly came across as by the time it was all said and done:
Biggest Loser: “Yeah, I woke up, like, 10 minutes before my class started this morning. I was like, oh my god, and ended up walking into class, like, five minutes after it started. At the end of the last class I attended, I was, like, put in a group, but I missed Friday’s class, and when I walked in, they were up in the front, like, doing a presentation. They were like, ‘Come on up here,’ and the one guy handed me a sheet of paper and said, ‘I’ll read the first half. You read the second half.’ I was, like, cool.”
Other girl: “Wow. So, like, you didn’t contribute anything at all to the group?”
Biggest Loser: “Yeah,” laughing and looking at her watch. “There’s no way I’m going to, like, make it to the post office by 5:00,” she said and I noted that it was 4:46.
Other girl: “What do you have to mail?”
Biggest Loser: “I have three bills to mail. And they’re all, like, overdue.”
Other girl: “Darn.”
Biggest Loser: “Yeah, I should have, like, mailed them Friday, but I had to get on the road. I was, like, at the beach all weekend, and I was, like, drunk the entire time I was there—even, like, while I was driving. And when I got back yesterday, my mom was like, ‘I want you to go to church with me, but I was, like, ‘I don’t have anything to wear.'”
During class tonight, we discussed a chapter of The Wisdom of Crowds, style guides for Twitter, and heard a presentation from Cathy on how social media is being used in a company called Promega.
Immediately following class was another phenomenal Salon at Mitch’s, which is documented in Salon Entelechy.