Act like you don’t hear

The move day is Friday, which means I toted two big bags of claw machine animals home last night, I’ll take some more stuff tomorrow night, and whenever I get that MP3 player set up, I will not be using it to shut people out on the train. I have been advised you don’t even need to have it working, because if you are just wearing the headphones it cuts you off enough, but I usually don’t actually want to be cut off. I don’t just greet birds and squirrels—I will often smile at people. They tend not to see, or to be shocked at any kind of acknowledgment, but sometimes I get a smile back.

Despite my tendency to be interested in the world around me, I can sometimes see that the isolationists have a real point. Here are a few stories of when I did not engage, or want to engage, but I was definitely listening.

This story is the least funny. I had been running late and so I was on a different train, and I heard this woman talking about selling a house. It was a little loud for a phone conversation or a conversation with a fellow passenger, but she kept going and I realized that she was telling all of the passengers. She wanted to sell a house. It was in traffic. She was not told it was in traffic, or she wouldn’t have bought it, but at least she was being upfront with us. I thought it was pretty bizarre, as well as ineffective, but I didn’t think about it too much.

A week or so later I ended up on the later train again, and she was there, and this time she was looking for a lawyer. Her civil rights had been violated. Also, she wanted to sell a house. If I understood correctly—and there is absolutely no guarantee of that—the civil rights violation was that she had not been informed that the house was in traffic when she bought it. (And I’m assuming “in traffic” means there is road noise near it, not that there are cars running through it, or that it is in the middle of drug traffic, but I do not know.)

Also, it would be helpful if the lawyer was familiar with Social Security law, because she was having some trouble with her payments, and they would not let her work, and if she was working she would be working at a million dollar company doing system administration, but I was skeptical because she was not demonstrating particularly good judgment or sanity by sharing her life in this manner. To be fair, she did say she had looked on the internet first.

Actually, it is fairly common to have people who seem quite fragile overshare on public transportation. I’m not sure that I believe that one girl who was carrying on the loud phone conversation on the streetcar steps. When the driver told her that she would need to move, she started crying that the woman who had just gotten off was her mother and that her mother was following her and ignoring her. I’m not saying that she seemed stable, but the timing of the meltdown seemed suspicious, and it would be weird to simultaneously stalk and shun someone, but it could happen. However, I think that, generally speaking, bringing everyone in on your life falling apart is not helpful. I think it would be more helpful to pick one sympathetic looking person, and let them help you. Though, if people did it that way, I would probably usually be the person, and I might not like that.

And this is where I feel jerky. Emotional instability and mental illness are not, which is where some of these people seem to be coming from. On one level I would like to be helpful, but in cases like this I tend to feel, and I may be wrong, that I can’t do much—that on some level these people want to be the center of attention. It is not really what they need, so I don’t want to play into it, but I also can’t fix it so I just ignore it. It’s the same level on which I deal with certain relatives, so I guess I treat everyone like family.

There are people who engage. I remember one night there was a guy talking loudly about how doctors poison you. The nurse was laughing at him, another guy was agreeing with him about doctors not being our friends, because it costs way too much to go to the dentist, and a young guy was agreeing with the whole thing, because he had worked as a janitor in a hospice and they just keep people dying in there—people who are already dead and don’t know it! (Actually, they take people who are already dying in, and these patients know they are dying, and the hospices try to make that transition better, but why worry about facts?) The most interesting part of this was that the young guy’s takeaway from all of this was that if he was ever diagnosed with a terminal disease, he was just going to crash his motorcycle to end it early. The nurse objected because that might be a great way to end up in long-term care. “Well, if I crashed into a wall, maybe, but if I go off a cliff I should die.” Smarter than he looks, that one.

See, I don’t really want in on those conversations, but I do eavesdrop shamelessly, and I do hate when people are mean. So when this very exuberant guy walked past a group of young people on the MAX platform, and they started repeating what he said under their breath and laughing, I felt bad for him. This might have been one of those times when I would have struck up a conversation, but as he ended his phone call, this nice young man started talking to him instead, and learned the hard lesson that I keep remembering: Don’t engage. It seems the reason for the first guy’s good mood was that the restraining order was dropped, and I really hope I heard this wrong, but it sounded like he said “Now I can go after my woman.”

Now, this should not be funny at all, but I’m not positive if that’s what I heard or that it meant that (maybe there was a new girl who liked him but had a rule against dating anyone with pending criminal charges), and the way the rest of the conversation went, and the way the nice young man now was committed to the conversation but did not know what to do with it—I just started laughing. It was silent, but he saw. I know he was jealous. Hey, you’re young; you will learn not to do this. Or not, because then we started talking after the train came, but we just talked about the weather and the area. There’s no point in jading the young and nice, because that will happen without any interference from me.