Happy New Year! Twenty fourteen. Yeah. Woo! Wooooooo!
I made a bunch of resolutions (as I do every year), but mine are not usually about being something but more about doing something. Among my list of those super ambitious and well-thought-out things that I am going to do, I am NOT resolving to stop talking badly about people. Like right now, I will regale you with a brief tale about a girl at Café on the Square on New Years Day. (Ugh. I’m annoyed even thinking about her crinkled-up self-important nose.) She embodied what is wrong with many people today, and I genuinely don’t understand how one can go through life being THAT bitchy.
Here’s the thing about restaurants: People go there to eat. And all she kept doing was looking around at everyone with a look of utter disgust. (I think it was because they were eating.) She looked everyone up and down fully, from head to toe and then toe to head. Each person got this whole twice-over vertical visual scan that was immediately followed with a duck-faced lip, pug nose and a sharp head turn to look away. It was as though the existence of everyone around her emitted this offensive litter box odor that was only discernable to her. While I watched her watching everyone else, I could almost see the little plastic bubble that she believed herself to be encased within. I could even hear the thoughts inside her head.
**Bear with me here, readers. Read this next part in the voice of that annoying girl. That annoying Los Angeles-voiced girl that drags out her syllables and ends everything she says with the same upward inflection that ends with her mouth open. Okay, yeah…that’s the voice. You got that in your head? **
“Oh my god! Sirously? Seeer-i-ous-ly? Are they eating? Ew. Why do I have to SEE them eating? Ugh. They’re so gross. This restaurant is gross. These people are gross. I mean, they are like EXISTING. Right here. Like, next to me. While I’M trying to exist. Ew.“
And then her eyes locked with mine. I had missed the initial sweep down to my toes, but I caught them on the upward inspection. They locked with my big espresso-colored irises, so naturally, I tried to engage her in conversation. After I spoke in full sentences TO HER, using actual discernable words, while maintaining eye contact, with very clear cues that she was the recipient of the words that were coming out of my mouth, she *seriously* snapped her bitchy shar pei face away from me. It was as though I had violently pierced her bubble with my existence.
Fast-forwarding to when she finally left: She actually pushed someone out of her way from the cashier station to snootily walk out of the café.
Then, an amazing thing happened.
Three tables full of eaters all turned their gaze from having watched her departure. We all looked at each other and collectively sighed that she was gone. Then we all engaged in a conversation about how in the world she goes through life like that. It was a great post-polar bear plunge breakfast, and I was excited to meet some new friends on the first day of 2014.
Yeah, I got their digits.
Stupid Bubble Girl.
Kelly Stone is a sexual health educator and college lecturer who likes to think of her stand-up comedy as “edutainment”. She began performing in 2006 at an open mic in Philadelphia and has been hooked on comedy ever since. She hosts the monthly Hot Mess Comedy Show at Bar 141 in San Marcos, speaks to various universities about anything they’ll pay her to talk about, watches Project Runway, and is still trying to figure out how to keep her boys from smearing Greek yogurt on the furniture. Follow her on twitter: @funnykelly or help stop her kids when they are trying to run across a busy street. There’s safety in numbers.