Recently I was on the subway. There was a beautiful young girl, who was wearing tall black-and-white striped socks like she had just stepped out of a Tim Burton movie or finished up her shift at Hot Topic. She had her head down and was reading her worn paperback. Since I am a total wimp and a total ooey gooey romantic, I thought about pulling out an index card (fun fact: my “organizational style” involves a series of color-coded index cards and stick-it notes only decipherable to me and whoever the guy was that Russell Crowe played in “A Beautiful Mind”) and writing her a note.
“You are one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen riding the subway,” the note would have read. (It would have been on the magenta card, the one with the blue backing.) “If you would want to call me, please do so. My number follows. If you have no interest, then at least you can use this card as a bookmark, and tell everybody you know how the shy guy on the train thought you were beautiful. I appreciate that you didn’t take a taxi.”
But I didn’t give this girl with the Cheshire Cat socks the card. This partially had to do with the aforementioned wimpiness, but the missed connection also happened because we both had our headphones on (she had the inner-ear variety; I had the Ibiza-DJ-style Bose models). What if I had given her that card? It would have been followed by a lot of flirting punctuated by me clumsily trying to arrange a date, possibly at the Olive Garden in Time Square. (Never underestimate the raw romantic power of the never-ending soup and salad bowl!) Headphones have become the commuting equivalent of the loud guy at the bar who wants to talk to you about the totally awesome Dave Matthews Band show he went to last week. They impede communication, flirtation and genuine human interaction. We’re so disconnected as it is, I say – if you’re around other humans and have your headphones on to drown out the bellowing child sitting next to you on the Metro North – unplug, listen and chat.
I understand that I’m an awful offender. I commute from suburban Connecticut, which involves an hour and fifteen minute train ride plus wherever the fuck I’m headed in New York City. Plus, I’m a music junkie, and see that time as an opportunity to listen to the new Muse album and gauge whether or not it’s complete shit (it is). Lately, too, I’ve had work piling up so that commute is essential to getting shit done — transcribing interviews or watching screeners or generally trying to get a handle on my life, using (again) a series of helpfully color-coded index cards.
But I wonder what would happen if I wasn’t listening to histrionic British pop rock and instead was listening to what was going on around me. I imagine it would be pretty inspiring. When I used to go out to dinner with the (now) ex-girlfriend, she would drop out of the conversation. We would then listen, intently, to the neighboring tables. “Tell me what they do for a living?” she would ask me. Or: “What do you think the relationship is between the young Indian girl and that older white man?” I would then put on my best (metaphoric) deerstalker hat and explain that the guy is a construction worker but wants to leave to work on his long-planned romance novel, while the relationship between the young Indian girl and the older white man is purely transactional.
If you want to be a writer, as SOME of you do, you have to listen to the speech patterns of other people, not just your own. It IS essential to have other voices in your head. And I’m not talking about the Leonardo DiCaprio-at-the-end-of-”Shutter Island” way, but other dialects, dictions, and idioms that only come from real life, honest-to-god human beings and not from what your imagination thinks other people sound like.
When Apple introduced a newly improved “ear bud” (renamed the “ear pod”), I cursed the computer screen, both because I have mild tourettes and because they were giving people another, super-efficient way to wall off interaction on the subway and sidewalks.
And it’s not just flirty interactions that I crave on the train. A couple of months ago there was a guy reading “11/22/63,” the jaw-droppingly brilliant Stephen King novel about a school teacher who goes back in time to try and prevent the Kennedy assassination (he gets more than he bargained for, of course, including but not limited to a sort-of friendship with Lee Harvey Oswald). I wanted to talk to the guy who was reading it and ask him where he was and if he had a similar experience, where I was in a Five Guys for lunch and almost started crying into my Cajun-style fries. But I couldn’t. Because I had my headphones on. It would have required me to turn off my headphones (yes, they’re battery-powered) and pull them off my ears and have a conversation. Which is a lot to ask. Plus I didn’t want to waste an index card.
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