The power of a bagel and a coffee

I am generally okay with disliking everybody. On a case by case basis, I find the good in people - often, the awesome - and that's plenty. Everyone else, everyone I don't know, can talk a long walk off a short pier for all I care.

At its most benign, we can euphemism-ify my behavior as "people watching"; one of my favorite things to do is stand on the stairs at Karaoke and observe the dynamics of the crowd, always with a jaded perspective. Really, it's misanthropy. And I accept that.

Somewhat coincidentally, I had a post in mind about just how much I dislike people. I spent about 3 hours traveling to and from a Yankees game, including all the accouterments one would expect from Yankees traffic on the Major Deegan. Waiting your turn on an off-ramp, only to have a self-important schmo zoom by in the shoulder with inches to spare, really raises up the bile.

Also I have been riding a fixie through New Brunswick every day. While I don't mind the hassle of interacting with motor vehicles on a regular ride, my commutes force me to interact with pedestrians. I now understand the thrill of alleycat racing (which is an unofficial bike race through a city, cars and pedestrians and all). It should be in the X-games. People are either blissfully unaware or malevolently apathetic (think about that last one... it works as well as jumbo shrimp).

Just watching kids cross the street from the dorms to the quad, or walking through the grocery store, it's all the same: people move with Brownian motion, bouncing to and fro like ping pong balls, the epitome (if not the definition) of a "drunken walk". And that's discounting the text-walkers. It's as if they simply lack any survival instinct, or at least a sense of communal optimality.

Someday, I'm going to have an ulcer. Thanks, everyone.

Tonight's session in the Dunkin Donuts did not start off well. Not one, but two individuals occupied two tables each, not because they needed the extra room, but because... I don't know why. A baby was screaming (and, mind you, I didn't get to there until after the Patriots eeked out their win). That bitterness was welling up again in my gut.

And then, at midnight, everything turned around. A girl around my age, who had been sitting quietly in the corner at least as long as I had, got up from her table. She walked up to the counter, bought a bagel and coffee, and walked straight over to the exhausted-looking homeless man.

"Excuse me," she offered with the sort of politeness one does not normally reserve for such a ridiculously dirty person, "are you hungry?"

His face lit up, and he smiled a fantastically toothless smile. She left the coffee and the bagel on his table and went right back to work. As should I.