Glimpses

Have you ever overheard a snippet of someone else's conversation and knew in an instant that you'd just heard the most significant and telling thing they'd said all day? You don't even need to hear the full exchange, just bits will do. Sometimes it's something that makes you laugh at the sheer absurdity of it. Other times it's disturbing and you wonder what the precursor to your particular snippet was in that particular conversation. I found a site that chronicles just these kind of snippets overheard in New York city. This had got to be my favorite of the last week:

Drunk girl #1: So I think I am going to go as something I totally hate for Halloween.
Drunk girl #2: What are you going as?
Drunk girl #1: I think I am either going as a Jew or a Chinese person
or a tourist.
Drunk girl #2: Hey, you know I am Jewish, don't you?
Drunk girl #1: I don't care, I am definitely going as a Jew.
Drunk girl #2: Shots?

--37th & 3rd
Overheard by: Brian McCormick

The funniest part of it all is that I can think of 3 different bars right at 37th & 3rd that could have very plausibly been the home of this little ditty. It also cracks me up that New Yorkers hate tourists. I know I do. I lived in Brooklyn for a whopping 8 months and I despise tourists with a passion usually reserved only for cockroaches and serial killers. I guess I shouldn't say that I hate all tourists all the time, but most and most is more than accurate. It's the little things they do that put their identity as a tourist on garish display that really get to me. The stopping right at the top of the subway stairs... the carrying of the golf umbrellas in the city, thereby blocking out and whacking into every other person on the sidewalk (note: this is not only a tourist behavior, sometimes city-dwellers themselves do this and they inspire equal, if not greater, contempt)... the wearing of the god awful fanny packs... the walking at the pace of a snail with a limp right down 7th Ave so that it poses less danger to walk in the street and risk getting hit by a taxi rather than wind your way through the throngs of slow-moving idiots on the sidewalk and be overcome by an urge to kick one or more of them. Ahh New York, get ready, I'm coming back!