Time to Shut Up
Last few days… what’s happened…?
Wednesday was so cool because Jen came over in the evening and we started thinking of words for the new Jentopia language Appanyan. It is awesome and pretty-sounding! And then we watched the new TV series “Lost” with Dominic Monaghan in it! Hopefully Wednesdays will be our Dom nights and the fun will continue. I’m sure next week she will steal the couch cushion I am sitting on.
Today on the two hour break (after getting 99% on my grammar exam, hot damn!) I went to Kensington with my SAIT friends. It was very beautiful there but I would have had so much more fun if I would not have been sick. I always get sick in September. Grr.
This morning I had the most annoying experience I’ve had in a long while. So I was sitting on the train platform listening to my music when this guy came up and got my attention. He asked if I knew exactly when the next train was coming and I said sorry, but no. Any normal encounter like this would normally end here. But this guy was like, “so where are you going? Are you a student?” I said yes, at SAIT. Apparently he was too, and in the new media program. Now, don’t get me wrong here. At this point I was not annoyed. I only got annoyed when he talked non-stop for the next fifteen minutes, stopping every so often to whine about how the train was not coming and that we were going to be late. And it wasn’t so much his incessant talking that had me grinding my teeth; it was that he was incessantly talking about himself.
When the train finally came I sat down in one of the few free seats and he was standing over me. The sun was behind him, but not directly, so that in order to look at him I’d get a face full of sun, which is very very bad since I am sick and my eyes for some reason become over-sensitive. Even a bit of sun makes me well up in tears, let alone effectively starting at it while listening to someone boring me to tears. So even though it was probably percieved as quite rude, I looked out the window on my other side. Did my not looking at him stop him from ceacelessly jabbering? No! He just kept going! When the person sitting next to me got off, he sat down, and wayyy too close. After he was through talking about himself, he started with the questions. Oh, the questions.
I didn’t actually answer the questions like this. Out loud, anyway.
“What program are you taking at SAIT?” Fair question. Digital graphics. “Uh, do you learn Flash in your program? We do.” Nope. “Do you learn film editing?” No. “Do you learn script writing? In new media we do.” No, I am in a different course. “Do you learn C++ in your program?” For the love of crap, NO! G-r-a-p-h-i-c-s! “Have you seen Hero?” Yes. “Have you seen the new Resident Evil?” Yes. (You should have seen his surprise. But why did he ask? He hadn’t seen either.) There were more questions that I forgot but I assure you, they were equally stupid.
What gets me is… why? Yes, small talk is necessary sometimes but why, why, why did he trap me in a dull, shallow and meaningless conversation for close to an hour? I get the feeling that people often mistake me for being a snob because I don’t talk to them, but really, it’s not that at all. If I can’t think of something to say, I won’t say anything. It has nothing to do with me not liking someone. If I don’t like someone, I will avoid them like the plague or complain about them in my journal or to someone else, but I won’t not make small talk with them. Geez.
I finally, finally escaped him after he told me his stories about getting wasted before class started one time and how he had no choice in the matter. The moral of the story is that some things are so annoying that it will make one avidly look forward to grammar class to get away from them.
