April 27, 2010
You're at a restaurant. Like most other times you've eaten out at a restaurant, you are with someone that you truly enjoy spending time with. They make you laugh, conversation is easy and comfortable, and you don't leave the meal thinking, "dear god, I've just wasted and entire hour of my life. Fantastic," because otherwise, why would you even be spending time with this person?
Well have you ever stopped and looked around at the other diners during one of these nights out? Who are they? Are they people who are having a great time? Are they people who got stood up? Are they people having an awkward conversation with a "frenemy"? Are they on a date?
What about what their eating... are they salad people, steak people, fish people, soup people, beer people, chips and margs people.. Who are they?
Well, this blog is here to serve as an online experiment with a favorite hobby of mine popularly called "people watching". Honestly, I could sit just about anywhere for hours and be happy not talking to a single person because really.. you can get a story from any person who walks by you solely based on judging them by their appearance. Now this sounds bad, you know.. the whole "dont judge a book by its cover" blah blah, but what I'm trying to get to the bottom of is what actually happened that made a piece of fuzz get stuck in that man's hair. Or what made that woman's jeans rip in the calf area? The question of it all is.. is this story you get from them true or not, and why do you get it from them?
This is the idea behind "The Dining Dead" (in my world at least). It seems that there is life everywhere, but who is living what life, and what do we actually consider LIVING a life, if there are so many ways to do so? Are whatever stories that turn up after looking at all these people what I personally believe as living life? And could my idea of living life be a polar opposite to what the person sitting next to me on the bus thinks is considered living a life? I mean there is no way to tell at all. This is what I'm getting at: there are so many people in the world, living their own lives and in so many different ways... so how on Earth can I have been so close minded to only concentrate on what living my life has been like all these years??
"The Dining Dead" is a referral to my own close minded-ness toward every single person out there that I do not pay attention to whenever I am anywhere. To me, until this point, they may as well have been "the dining dead". Through this blog, I will bring these diners back to life in my world and see what they have to offer, which I'm sure is going to be quite a trip!
So I invite you as well to look around. YES, I actually give you permission to go and stare at random people in the world. If they see you staring.. hey, give em a smile and maybe even get their real story. What is the point in living life if there is no one there to share it with? (even if it is just us crazy people watchers..) So go hear some stories and judge people, you never know... you might hear something worthwhile.
PEACE for today!
I love ppl watching!!! This blog is fun, I like the topic you chose for this post!!! But yeah it seems when ever I go out to eat, I barely notice the people around me, so I'm going to try something different and become more aware of who's around me, I think it will definitely make life more interesting! It's also interesting the things that people do not normally see when they are not looking for it.
ReplyDeleteLast friday, I was at the train station, sitting waiting for my boyfriend to arrive, and I noticed this strange family. The boy was African-American, and the woman caucasian, and that was not the strange part. The strange part seemed to lie within the dynamics of their conversation because there was none. The boy sat with his head down, baseball cap over his eyes, clearly focused on his gameboy, and the mother kept muttering a few words to him, which I could not hear, but the boy did not look up once. I was confused, but as i continued watching, I started analyzing the mother. She was extremely thin, looked to be in her mid-late 50s. However maybe it was part of my imagination, but I believed I noticed her being very jittery, she turned her head in quick movements, she was constantly getting up and walking away from the table. Not once did she tell the boy "I'll be right back" I noticed she left to talk on her enormous cell phone, which made me question their financial situation, it seemed off balance with the things I was seeing because the boy had a gameboy, the mother had a cellphone, the boy seemed to have a nice brand new baseball hat, yet when kept watching the mother suddenly looked over at this bowl with bread in it, unattended. She quickly looked around, got up and glided over there, peaked in the bowl, took a hamburger patty, and came back, eating the food kind of ravenously. So, maybe they had a few belongings, yet could they could be homeless? Could they not afford certain things to the point where the mom has to steal food? Another question was did the mom do drugs, based off of her jitters, her muttering, and unaturaly thin appearence? I will never know, and I could be completely wrong, based off of my judgement.
It was strange, yet I feel like I've learned something. To see something that I think...a lot of people don't see, brings an awareness about other peoples situations, which in turn could lead to understanding and compassion, if we just looked around more with open minds.
I was eating sushi tonight. The woman at the table next to me got up quickly, turned to walk outside and proceeded to walk face first into a plate glass window. After a barely perceptable hesitation, she turned and walked to the side and out the door... The surrounding tables began to chuckle and then I realized there was a perfectly formed nose print on the window and began to laugh myself.
ReplyDeleteNow I find myself wondering. Why did she leave so abruptly? Clearly something happened in her life to cause such a strong move and then to have the embarrassment of running into the window... Did she even notice the embarrassment... I need to pay more attention to people as I'm certain there was much more to her life than what I gave her credit for at the time.