Sidewalk snippets: 2/20/14

WARNING: This post contains bad words. 

I am fascinated by what happens as I walk down the sidewalk in my new city. 

I work in the music district, so there are always young kids with various instrument cases striding by. It’s not unusual to hear a discussion of the relative merits of Hayden or Mozart in line at the coffee shop. I work near Northeastern University, so there are kids of all colors and kinds around all the time. For the record, I don’t think I was ever that young, even when I was in college.

There is something fascinating about walking down a city street and listening to the snippets of conversation that pass by. In my mind’s eye, they form a kind of sine wave, a fleeting few seconds of insight into someone’s world at the top, then quiet at the trough as he/she moves on, likely forever. 

This is begging for some sort of artist expression but I can’t figure out the medium; it’s such a fleeting thing, and there’s absolutely no story arc. 

Anyway, until someone more creative than I figures it out, I thought I’d share some of my favorites in a new series called Sidewalk Snippets.  It seems like I should at least remember these little moments; they are beautiful and funny and profound and illustrative of how rich the patterns of daily life really are. And how the word like should be eliminated from daily use, but that’s a rant for another day. 

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2/20/14 – Heard on South Huntington Ave, Boston, MA, while walking back from lunch.

“So at one point I was like, ‘fuck you’. Later on, he was like ‘ok’. It was so funny.” 

“It was a type 2 error, I’m sure of it. The code was doing this thing…”

“Dude, I don’t want to be 20. That’s, like, adult accountability shit.”