I am fascinated by the snippets of conversation we hear in passing every day. There was a time when I swore that on BRAG I was going to write a poem consisting of the scraps of words I heard as people walked by my tent at night. But I never did, and then I stopped sleeping in a tent, and the only scraps of conversation I hear now are the words of Rozmo talking in her sleep. Oh well. It was a nice thought.
Today I was walking back to my classroom from the cafeteria, and I saw our resource officer (fancy name for a sheriff's deputy who works in the school) approaching the boys' bathroom on the main hall. He didn't look to be in a particular hurry, and I heard him greet a student as he walked in the bathroom. (And it occurred to me to wonder, does the resource officer just walk in there and do his business at the urinal while he chats with male students who might be in there? Because that just seems a little weird to me, but I'm neither a guy nor a cop, so what do I know?)
He said to the young man, "Hey, what cha doing?" Not in a challenging way, just one of those standard greetings that doesn't mean anything and doesn't even require a real answer. The boy could have said, "Nothing," and the exchange wouldn't have registered as a blip on my radar.
Instead, the young man's reply is burned into my brain cells and making me wish I had a "Delete" button, or maybe even a "Control/Alt/Delete" combination.
He either said, "Checking my zits" or "Picking my zits" (that's the danger with snippets of conversations, sometimes you can't be sure if what you think you heard is actually what you heard, but odds are the grossest words are the ones you can be absolutely certain of).
Perhaps I could write my poem based on hallway snippets instead of cycling/camping ones.
Shudder.
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