Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Dave Pollard writes three brief stories of observations he made about conversations taking place on public transit. I've written previously about one asking what was the last book someone read, and another asking someone they would like to talk, and then having a conversation about whatever came to mind. Yesterday afternoon, while on the bus home, I was seated just before the 'accordion' part of the articulated buses here, where a long-haired, dark skinned guy noticed the key-chain of a tattooed guy in a baseball cap. The logo on the key-chain was a stylize "NA", and after overhearing part of the conversation relating to it being two years since and that the tattooed guy said "it's another day", I realized the NA was the logo for Narcotics Anonymous. The bus was too loud for me to hear anything more of significance, but the two guys introduced each other and congratulated each other. A friend of mine once did a presentation on how many communities form because all the participants share an addiction, and here was a community of two because one made an immediate connection based on what was on the other's keychain.

I often wish there was some protocol to intitiate a conversation with someone who has nothing obvious about which they can talk on their person. I can only think of a few times where this worked for me, one when I noticed a girl was studying from the same Chinese textbook I studied from because hey, it's interesting that a white guy would want to study Mandarin, even these days when people are saying China is the next threat to American dominance. (They're wrong, by the way.)

Two ideas have come to me recently as a very frequent transit rider: one is a community website much in the same vein as CTA Tattler, a weblog of stories about the Chicago Transit Authority. Instead of being a weblog, though, it would accept user-submitted content from around the world, be they news about their local public and private transit systems as well as stories (true and fiction) of the weird shit that sometimes goes down on the bus, boat, or train in their city. The second idea, to encourage people on the bus to talk to each other, even if it's to say "nice day, isn't it?", would be for those who are of the acting persuasion to infiltrate public transit and do some improv. Nothing scripted, and nothing planned, and nothing paid for, but rather a public service to get people to copy their example and talk to the pretty girl or cute guy sitting next to them. Or even if the person is "just" a stranger, because everybody has a story to tell or an opinion or strange facts that they may have learned during the drudgery at their place of employ.

Dave's best story is the third, partly because it involves a goth girl—There's Something About Goth Girls—but mostly because the story would not have happened had it not been for the kid exclaiming that he had seen a "clown". People with kids are probably the easiest people to start a conversation with on public transit, and that has mostly to do with the fact that kids haven't yet learned that they are not supposed to point out the truth and most haven't yet learned how to be shy with that truth. That the goth girl didn't take herself so seriously that she got offended and that she turned it into a performance probably made the day for everybody on the bus.