Small Things

During our first few days here in Boston, we went to a place called Quincy Market. While browsing through some of the stalls, we bumped into a young woman wearing a headscarf. She gave my mother one of the sunniest smiles I have ever seen. “That,” my mother informed me, grinning, “was the smile of familiarity.”

The weather here is really unpredictable. I have seen more rain that I usually do all year back at home, experienced temperatures I would call cold and still managed to get a tan.

It has been really cloudy the past couple of days. I enjoy staring at the swirls of white and grey drifting dreamily through the sky. I was doing that one day while on the bus, when the clouds parted slightly and warm sunlight fell straight on my face. Just my face. The fact that hundreds of tons of gases reacted in the Sun, creating light and heat which travelled for over eight minutes through the nothingness of space just to fall on my face makes me feel quite special.

Extremely crowded trains can be awkward. With so many human bodies forced into a tin can (of sorts) it is not possible to find a direction to look in without making someone feel that you might be staring at them. Looking up and down aren’t exactly solutions either. With the former, you may end up staring up the armpit of the tall guy who decided to wear a sleeveless vest that day. With the latter, you might get distracted by someone’s bright green nail polish or worse, miss your stop because you weren’t paying attention.

McDonald’s fruit smoothies are divine.

It is okay to wear your pants low if you want to. It is not okay to wear your pants low if you’re not wearing underwear and insist on standing in the bus and holding on to the rubber loops which makes your t-shirt ride up. Nobody wants to see the moon during the day.

It amazes me how freely people can talk in public spaces such as on a train or in the bus. Or perhaps I am the kind of person who doesn’t talk freely enough. Either way, I have overheard some rather interesting conversations such as the argument between a couple where the woman refused to take a shower until the man did something about the mould growing there. Weirder still was when a man told his friend how he liked women who weren’t ‘girly girls’ and admitted that he often attracted lesbians (though that bit didn’t make much sense to me).

I am compiling a list of things I’d like to do this week before I leave for home. I think a visit to Cheesecake Factory tops the list.

During the long bus ride from where I live to the subway station, I pass through a street called Myopia Street. I always wonder if Retinal Detachment Avenue or Cataract Road are nearby.