~Friday~ This is the first time I’ve seen the bus do this, as I’m pretty sure it’s “against the rules”: There was a family—father, mother, and child—waving at the bus right smack dab in the middle of two stops, and it stopped and picked them up.
Li’l Dino boarded this morning and sat up front across from Diarrhea-of-the-Mouth, who hasn’t been on for a while, but has lost not one decibel of her vocal volume in her absence. Constant and loud. They sat across the aisle, which was wide as they were sitting in the long center-facing seats on either side of the bus, and got to laughing and cackling so hard one time that they high-fived about it both having to get up off their seats to meet in the middle of the aisle. The woman from the mid-stop-picked-up-family turned her face away from them so as not to appear to have been listening to their conversation—as if anyone on the entire bus had a chance of that—while her husband unabashedly laughed along with them revealing two mismatched front teeth—one gold, one silver.
At a subsequent stop, a girl got on who was on her cell phone; however she was not our so-named Cell Phone Lady. But, she definitely would have given ours a run for the money. This one had ear buds in and where the wires from each ear bud met, there was a little gadget, which I think was the microphone. She didn’t make any effort to bow her head and speak softly into the gadget, but rather kept her head straight up as if she were talking to someone sitting right next to her, or probably more accurately, like she was talking to someone on the bus across the aisle from her. In other words, too damn loudly.
As if it couldn’t get any more irritating, she sat under one of the new signs, which I noticed just last week, that read:
In order to serve you better, please refrain from:
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If she were playing, “Big bucks! Big bucks! No Whammies!” on how she did with those three items, it’d’ve looked something like this:
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Walking from the bus to my work building, I experienced one of those implicit affirmations, when someone sees you from afar and decides to wait to walk the rest of the way with you, when they could just as easily have waved and walked on alone before you caught up with them.
It was Tina, who’s an HR rep for the university who’s working with our management team on professional development. In the short walk together, I learned that her husband was from Massachusetts, too, which came out around our conversation about differing body temperature of folks. It was hot again on the bus this morning, yet there were people with coats on. You know the drill by now, so I didn’t mention it this time.
She said, “My husband’s the same way. He’s from Massachusetts, and he just doesn’t get cold as easily as people from around here do.”
At my building—where I have to wave an NC State proximity badge that I wear around my neck in front of a scanner inside the elevator in order to activate the floor buttons—I waved my Go Pass bus fare card in front of the outside button to open the door. I’ll give you a topic: You just push the outside button, and even if it did have a scanner on it, it wouldn’t be the bus fare card that would activate it. Discuss.
I worked from the office this morning, and caught the 12:30 bus home to work the afternoon from home. The bus driver stopped so long at the corner of Western and Method, which is not a schedule sync stop, but is in front of a convenience store. He was gone for at least four minutes, which is a long time to sit on a bus at a stop that isn’t a sync stop, without a bus driver. Coming back with not even as much as a drink, it was obvious that he just had to take a big, long dump.
I ran over to the “Brickhaven Building,” which is off Method Road, and met with a colleague for about 20 minutes. The person I was meeting wanted to do it over the phone, but I insisted on going to his office, as what we had to talk about involved looking at computer screens and how things work on them, which is all so tedious to do over the phone, unless you can take over someone’s screen and manipulate it from your own office.
I met Robert at the Carolina Theater for the 9:15 showing of Coco Before Chanel, which we both very much enjoyed. As Robert put it, “It was a very well-done period piece.”
| Synopsis: Several years after leaving the orphanage to which her father never returned for her, Gabrielle Chanel finds herself working in a provincial bar. She’s both a seamstress for the performers and a singer, earning the nickname Coco from the song she sings nightly with her sister.
A liaison with Baron Balsan gives her an entree into French society and a chance to develop her gift for designing increasingly popular hats. When she falls in love with English businessman Arthur Capel further opportunities open up, though life becomes ever more complicated. |
I didn’t know that Audrey Tautou played Coco in this movie, and I love her! And as a bonus, the guy she falls in love with in the movie, actor Alessandro Nivola (whew!), was just plain hawt.