“If you’re not a teacher, you should be.”

Per usual, the line at the movie theater was outrageously long. I suppose that’s what I get for going to see a movie on a Sunday afternoon, but standing around with forty other people waiting for one of three registers to open so I can order an overpriced Coke is never going to be a pleasant experience, especially when I’m surrounded by families. Worse still, I’m surrounded by children.

My arms are folded and defensive, I may or may not be flexing so the girl in the Paramore shirt can see the muscles I don’t have. Her hair is blue and black, and it looks like she’s there with her boyfriend. “Doesn’t matter,” I think to myself, “I’m miles better looking than that guy.” His hair is dry and curly, a frizzy mop given the humid weather outside. He’s wearing a brown shirt that’s two sizes too big. “At least my clothes fit,” I say to myself, even though it probably looks like I got my shirt from the children’s section of H&M. Whatever.

In the few minutes that I’ve been standing here quietly judging the guy in front of me, the line has moved maybe a few inches. The family in front of us is taking forever to order, and apparently they’re going to order one of everything on the menu. Their final tally comes up to roughly sixty bucks. Sixty fucking dollars for food at a movie theater…Jesus Christ, what kind of society do we live in where that’s even remotely okay?

The future seems dark and relatively hopeless. The line isn’t moving and I’m the only pretty person here. Ugh, woe is me. The family in front of us finally walks away with their literal bags of food, and thankfully Paramore-girl and mop-head are only buying a bottle of water. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m on my way to reaching the paradise of the theater seats. So it seemed, anyway, until one of the children to my right decides to start kicking and screaming for no reason.

This child is screaming its goddamn head off, and per my grumpy being I hang my head in annoyance. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I mutter, “Would you mind shutting that kid up?”

Everyone’s staring, needless to say. The child’s mother is mortified and failing miserably at trying to quiet her daughter. No one wants to help, and the only thing the woman behind me can say is “Aww, poor kid.” Poor kid? Poor kid? You’re joking, right? I’m the one that has to suffer through this screaming. Poor me.

And then it happens. Christ himself descends from the sky and kneels down in front of the child, palms resting gently on her shoulders. He looks deeply into her eyes and says, “Be still, my child. All is right.” Jesus then reaches into his robes and pulls out a box of Buncha Crunch, offering the candy up to the child as a peace offering. The child, in awe of what just happened, takes the candy in utter glee and wraps her arms around her savior. “Thank you, Jesus! I love you!”

The son of God then spreads his arms, hands open and palms up, looks to the sky, and departs for Heaven. A warm glow surrounds the theater, and everyone begins to applaud. “Christ is risen!” shouts one woman, followed by another man shouting “Praise be to Him!”

…

Okay, so maybe Jesus didn’t actually descend from Heaven to hush the crying child, but a man did kneel down to her to make an attempt at quieting her.

The man, dressed in a blue t-shirt emblazoned with the image of Pac-Man, steps toward the child and rests his palms on her shoulders. The little girl is mortified. Her crying has ceased and now, I’m sure, she just wants to know why the fuck this weird old man is touching her. He leans in close and says, “You think you have it bad now?”

“You’ve got it easy kid. Save those tears for later. You haven’t had your heart broken yet, you don’t have student loans to take out, you aren’t dying, and you’re about to see a movie. Things could be worse.”

The girl, still staring at the man blankly, asks “How?”

So the guy sits down and crosses his legs and tells the girl flat out, “We all die someday. I’m going to die, you’re going to die…why cry over candy? Why waste the tears? Save them for what really matters. Save those tears for when you’re drowning in debt and you don’t know how you’re going to make rent.”

By now the girl is totally silent, and has her arm wrapped around her mother’s leg. The man stands up, and people actually start clapping. The woman behind me says to him, “If you’re not a teacher, you should be.” He nods, chuckles, and says thank you. He’s proud of himself, and apparently proud of his grim little diatribe.

I’m fucking mortified though. His discussion of reality now has me thinking about my eventual death and the fact that I, too, have student loans to pay back.

Another woman, who didn’t hear the man’s speech, asks “What did you tell her?”

He smiles, leans in — this dude has a hard-on for leaning, I swear it — and says, “I just told her about how awful life can be. She doesn’t understand concepts like death and debt right now, but one day she will and she’ll realize that crying over candy is so totally inane.” There’s intelligence in his reasoning, and I see his point. I still wonder why the hell he would say that to a child instead of something lighter. Maybe this guy had issues of his own, right?

This man is the hero today, and I feel like the villain. He helped and I just quietly complained. He was relatively selfless in his attempts to quell the little girl’s cries, and I just wanted to tell the girl to shut up. Good and evil, I think, light and dark. He may not be Jesus, and he may not even be a teacher…but maybe he should be.

The Neighbors

I live with a crazy woman. She’s been analyzed and declared sane and competent, but she is without doubt batshit crazy. She firmly believes that her cat is the embodiment of the son she never had, she’s missing anywhere between a quarter and a third of her brain, and she recently signed three different contracts with three different companies to install brand new windows in the entire house and — as a result — has since lost almost $8,000 and is aiming to lose much, much more. Legally sane, yes, but ridiculously crazy.

My neighbors seem to blow her crazy out of the water. Three or four people, from what I gather — a mother, a son my age, a younger son, and a daughter that I’ve only recently seen — live in the older quasi-Victorian style white house.

The mother, forty-something, is tall, tan, and blonde. I don’t see her much unless she’s sitting in her van smoking or outside arguing with her eldest son. Her ex-husband lives a street over, and frequently drives by in his flashy BMW coupe to show off how great his life is now that he doesn’t have to worry about her or the kids. From the information I’ve gathered, she gets doped up on anti-depressants and pain meds constantly.

The son, the one my age, looks like he walked out of an Urban Outfitters catalog. I see him walking around the neighborhood in pastel chinos with a cigarette hanging from his mouth every now and then. Like his mother, he too takes medication, but he takes lithium for what I assume to be bipolar disorder. He doesn’t appear to interact with anyone except his mother, but even then they communicate through loudness. On occasion I see him sitting on his back patio smoking and staring out into the yard.

The youngest son is a nuisance, frequently leaving behind his skateboards and bicycles and toys strewn about both their yard and mine. He stares through their front door at anyone who passes by, and I firmly believe his only vocal setting is “loud”. Sometimes I see him beg his older brother to play with him — to go riding with him or kick the ball around, to do anything — but the older brother simply pushes him away and walks on by himself.

The daughter, who I have only recently started to see, is perhaps the only normal one in the house. She plays with her younger brother, takes him to his friend’s house, and walks their dog. She’s tall with a full head of sand colored curly hair. I think she recently graduated high school due to the fact that her mother’s van recently had “Congrats Grad!” written on the back of it, but I’m not totally certain. Honestly, the daughter is the only person in the family I’ve ever seen smile. She’s the only one that talks instead of shouts.

The crack in the otherwise perfect face of suburbia starts with this family. Perfect house, perfect lawn, and an outwardly picturesque family to anyone that might drive by on any given day. Like any family, however, they are far from perfect. Love affairs, mental instability, and foundation shaking arguments that dot the week shed light on their otherwise quiet and somewhat eerie existence.

The Little Sh*t

He’s here more often than I am, and the people here like him less than the freebie skater boy. Sure he’s only a kid, but there’s something about him that just doesn’t sit right with the people around him.

His height is basically non-existent. He is, at best, four-foot-something. Shaved head, big teeth, and he’s always “dancing”. I’m sure to him it looks like he’s the next Justin Timberlake or Michael Jackson or some other smooth pop-star, but in his outward appearance he looks awkward and corny. Of course there’s nothing wrong with awkward and corny — I myself was an utterly terrible mixture of those two when I was his age. The difference, however, is that I wasn’t so outwardly and inexplicably rude to the people around me.

He comes in every night with a man that appears to be his grandfather — though it could be his dad, I won’t pretend to know. They don’t really talk to one another even when they leave the store and sit for a couple of hours at a table outside. The man he comes in with orders a tall coffee, as plain and bold and black as tar. He used to order the kid a cup of water but has since stopped that because they started charging for it. While the older man waits for his drink, the kid runs or walks or dances around the store as if it were his home. He bumps into people and doesn’t say “excuse me” or apologize, he’ll — no, look, one time he came up to me and stared at my laptop screen for a solid minute before looking at me and saying “‘Sup?”

‘Sup? ‘Sup? Who the hell does this shortstack think he is?

Like the freebie boy, this one has a reputation as well. Where the other kid asks for free stuff, this one is known for his rudeness and inability to stop doing things when people ask him to stop. He’s known for his sense of entitlement.

“Is he in school?” asks one of the baristas.
“No, I don’t think so,” starts another, “I asked him if he was and he told me he wasn’t allowed to go to school.”

They laugh in disbelief. Not allowed to go to school? That’s crazy talk.

“One time I caught him with his hand in the tip jar!” says an employee.
“Oh my god! What did you do?”
“I yelled at him! I told him to get his hand out of it and told him to leave before I called the cops!”
“That’s crazy. He’s so rude!”

They laugh again, this time in agreement. They discuss a time when he purposely knocked over a container of half & half and ran out before they could get to him. Why they even let him back inside is beyond me, why they haven’t talked to the man that brings the boy in is even further beyond me.

Behind me sits another man on a MacBook, and through the sounds of spitting espresso machines and laughing baristas I hear four simple words roll off his tongue…

What a little shit.

“You can observe a lot by just watching.”

On the dot, Yogi Berra, on the dot. 

There’s a difference between simply watching people and studying them, I’d argue. It’s a slight difference, noticeable only to some — perhaps only those who actually observe the people around them instead of simply notice them. Wow, look at my words getting all mixed up. 

So let’s say you’re at an airport. Let’s use Chicago Midway, for example, because I hate that airport with a burning passion unlike any other. So you’re at Midway and you’re waiting to board your flight to somewhere-or-another, and you’re surrounded by people. Hundreds of people surround you, pass you, brush up against you when they’re trying to fit through a crowd. The odds are high that you’ll notice things about these people; that guy’s wearing a red tie, that kid has on fake Nikes, or maybe that woman over there is carrying an alligator skin purse. You notice these things, but they pass you by. You shrug them off, as you should, because what do they mean to you? What should they mean to you? 

And then you have people that really observe these examples. He’s wearing a red tie, but his socks mismatch his shoes and his shirt is maybe just a size too large. He’s sweating profusely, so maybe he’s afraid of flying or — maybe — his necktie is just a tad bit too tight. His phone goes off but he can’t hear it because too many people around him, kids perhaps, are being too loud.

The kid with the fake Nikes has a bandage on his knee but you can still see some of his scrape, which he may have gotten on the playground running around with his friends who for all we know wear fake Nikes too. He’s wearing blue basketball shorts and a Batman t-shirt, so we decide he likes superheroes. 

The woman with the alligator skin purse is wearing velvet high heels and a brooch that doesn’t match the rest of her outfit. Her hair looks nice in the front but the backside is either too flat or too poofy, and one of her nails is broken as well. The stench of her perfume — strong enough to knock out a grizzly bear — wafts through the gate and you fear that once on the plane everyone will suffocate from the smell.

You observe. Instead of just watching people and letting the details pass you by, you take advantage of them. Sure your mind my get carried away and build imaginary backgrounds for these people, but that’s part of the fun of people watching — that’s part of the fun of character studies. Details, people, details are important! It’s a beautiful part of living!