stupid dogs and what s-h-i-t-t-y spells
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
You overhear things all the time when you're in a city where people speak loudly (and you understand the language).
Recently I've overhead a businessman counseling a fellow entrepreneur on some work she was trying to have done. She'd contracted someone to build a type of software or website and was fretting that she'd overpaid. And then she admitted that she didn't know how to use computers and didn't have one.
On the streetcar, too, you sometimes hear more than you want to. A few weeks back a young woman spent the entirety of the stretch of Queen Street between Woodbine and the city core talking about her new nightshift job in kitchen of the Holiday Inn and the various details of making a go of things here in Toronto as an immigrant. She also got into some curiously personal things at some length.
This happened again just last week when another woman started talking with a girlfriend. They discussed the death of the TTC-goer's younger brother, and how her father was withholding the release of the body until the speaker's mother gave him back some of his possessions from prior to the parents' divorce. This went on for fifteen minutes while other riders shot the woman looks. At some point they changed topics and the woman on the phone started minding her surrounds. I don't know what they were talking about but I suppose it had to be more personal(!) because she started shielding her conversation with her hand and her body.
Today, after something of a rough day dealing with the theft of my identity, I ran some errands. I heard to snippets of conversation that were more fun. The first was a girl of about eight asking her mother, "What word does S-H-I-T-T-Y spell?" The second was a haggard-looking fellow on Queen Street telling a woman, "I learned my lesson a long time ago: never buy a stupid dog."