Last night at the Ann Arbor is Overrated meetup I was evangelizing Flickr and telling people about my favorite Flickr user: bjohnson. He posts a picture of his current necktie virtually every day. There’s something obsessively great about it and when he wears a bow tie it’s like winning the lottery.
One response to “My friend Flickr”
Today on the way to work there were a bunch of business people sitting near me talking about business stuff. Usually I hate it when people sit down near me and start talking during my morning commute….it’s like 8 am….I don’t want to hear anything but “doors to my right” every five minutes. These guys were really interesting to me though. There were four of them, and they had the good foresight to make sure that each of them were about 10 years older then the one sitting to their right. That made for a 45 minute conversation between a bunch of 30-40-50-60 year old white male republicans. I can’t be sure that they were republicans….but I usually just assume that old white people are. There wasn’t really anything specific about what they said that made me pretend to read my book while I listened and watched them intensely…..it was more their mannerisms that caught my eye. I’m never really in a position to watch people like that interact with each other, and it got me thinking about how I’ll act when I’m 30-40-50-60. It’s been my experience that “old people” tend to think that other people owe them something for some reason. Like just the act of getting to this magical number somehow entitles them to forego a lot of rules that everyone else has to abide by. Plus I also hated them for being business people. I think that the act of going to a job from 9am to 5pm everyday (which i am guilty of too) puts a lot of people in this very specific “comfort zone”. Like they don’t really have to deal with anything in the world except for what they allow in their daily commute back and forth to work. There’s no real conflict in these people’s lives…..just this script of back and forth that sometimes gets interrupted with little devations that, while small and petty, become a desperate point of conversation to take home so they’ll have something to talk to their wives about. It also didn’t help that these people were on their way to the airport. The airport is one stop away from my work….so I’m constantly plagued with mass transit “tourists” who think of the ride to their flight as some kind of novelty.