Thursday, November 15, 2007

Further Adventures In Strangeland

I have already documented how the collection of eating places nearest my work is a vortex of bizarre behavior. First there was Bra Girl. Then there was the Cup of Ice. You will hopefully be pleased to learn that I have two new stories for your enjoyment.
First is the tale of the Pillow Salesmen. Yes, pillows. Now, keep in mind that this area consist of a bunch of restaurants next to each other and a large outside eating area, sort of like a plaza. In fact, exactly like a plaza. So as I was sitting in the warm sun enjoying my sushi and conversing with my friend, I looked up and saw something that completely arrested my attention. I stopped speaking mid-sentence. There were two men with their arms full of those memory foam pillows, all boxed up. They went to a few tables, selling the pillows. Then they went inside the sushi restaurant and sold more. I was apparently the only person who found this strange, since people were buying them like they had never seen pillows before.
The second story is better. This just happened today, and I need to take a moment to digress because I just discovered that the Pepsi logo on my cup is surrounded by a double rainbow of text smileys of various sorts, like this: :-( :-< -O :) :-E ;-) etc. Interesting design choice. Oh, the background is all different sizes of smileys, all in varying shades of blue and overlapping. It's an emoticon collage. There is a website. Curiouser and curiouser...
Ok, back to the story. I'd been eating for a little while when a girl sat down at the table next to my friend and I. Normally not a notable occurrence, except that this girl looked a bit like Natalie Portman and had a lot of facial piercings and a boy haircut. She pulled out a tupperware thing of some food and started eating. Then a guy at another table got up to walk his plate to the trash. The following conversation ensued, which I need to just write down verbatim:

Girl: Um, excuse me? [Guy stops] I know this will sound really strange, but, um, were you going to throw those away? [gestures at pieces of a sushi roll on his plate]
Guy: Well, yeah...[confused]
Girl: Do you think that I could, um, have them?
Guy: Yeah, if you want. I already ate the cucumber out of the middle though. [apologetic]
Girl: Oh, that's alright. [takes the sushi pieces off of his plate] Thanks!
Guy: No problem! [leaves]

The reason I know exactly what they said is because I was full on staring at them while this was happening. Because, seriously? Who does that? And I'm sure I had some sort of 'the fuck?' look on my face, since I have no control over my facial expressions. You can absolutely tell what I am thinking by looking at me. My friends are constantly stopping mid sentence and swinging their heads over to my line of sight to see what I'm making a face about. It's kind of a problem, really. But yeah. Under what circumstances is that acceptable behavior? And the guy responded to her like she had asked him a perfectly sensible question and was in no way freaked out.

I love this town.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Alright Sarah, what is up with the lack of effort being put into this journal? I miss your regular updates and the series that you began so long ago and seemed to have discontinued. Come back to the world of cyber blogging!!!!

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