Peoplewatch Blogject: Day 3, 6/15/09

The Rules:
No location tags more specific than city.
No listening in on conversations.
No specific identification details beyond the visually observable.
No posting about people I know.
No posting about the same person repeatedly.
Observation and posting happens for a solid hour at a time, every day.

The point isn't to invade anyone's privacy, and it's certainly not to produce good writing. It's just to practice watching, and to write every day (even if it's bad).

Her glasses look like they were designed once upon a time to be tea saucers, but she’s long-since harnessed them and affixed them to her face. Bored face droops over the form she fills out on the back of her book. Her chin’s receded into her head, and grown a second jowlier one beneath and behind. She’s got pristine white Velcro-on shoes, and brown mat hair that looks like it was poured on and then kiln-dried.

There’s a woman in a pink shirt-- the kind that’s housewife-stylish, buttons to just beneath her breasts, with a smattering of embroidered daisies across the front. Her face is granite-textured, not form a history of pimples or traumas, but from the natural creases and lumps of her flesh. She gives everything a sleepy, skeptical glare. The paper she reads, she doesn’t believe. Nor the TV she watches. Nor the man across the room, flicking through real-estate ads. She casts around at every new movement from under her mane of hair, and reaches inside her sleeve to scratch her elbow.

The first thing I notice about her is the redness under her eyes. She’s got this desperate, but not unhappy look, a contradiction in terms she balances by sheer uncertainty. Her foot’s propped up at the ankle like she’s self-conscious about returning it to the ground. Frumpy, loud flower print in teals and blacks and whites is stretched over her abdomen, cuts it into sections. When she stands, her greasy bob shifts under her headband almost as a single unit. The rolls of her midsection disappear as her blouse shifts, and she waddles away.

Tan, black, white stripes on his polo. He’s got a fanny pack loose round his waist, and the bulk of it’s resting between his legs. His head’s rolled to the side, against the wall. His mouth hangs open (a fact his wife ignores as she needlepoints). Red flesh and wisps of hair, and a gently moving chest. His watch is mostly silver except for a perfect gold ‘O’ round its face. He squints beneath his glasses.

The way her bleached hair is giving way to her brown at the roots looks almost natural. Ultra-tan, but she’s aging well; she carries herself like she’s mid-forties, though she looks younger. Her face is manish, broad-jawed, flat nose, eyes wide-set. She dresses that way too, plaid button-down and straight-legged jeans. She stands up to get a beeper, and takes wide strides out of the room.

The woman’s face puffs out like anaphylaxis. Her hair looks accidental; a series of blonde sideswept waves, that curls away from her ears, at the tips. She squints through glasses thicker than they are wide, already gloriously engrossed in her book, not twenty pages in. Her dress goes up around her throat, like its designer was attempting homicide via dress-strangulation.

thoughtjunkie

metadata