Bus Ride Entertainment

[Sorta like Real Life Funnies only I can't draw.]

I spent the first 15 minutes of my bus ride to campus yesterday listening to the travails of Blabby Abby, a woman in her early 20s who spoke as though she just blew into town from Harlan County, Kentucky. She called one friend after another on her cell phone – an older-looking model, it appeared from my seat ten feet away. None of the conversations lasted more than a minute. The volume of her voice was more appropriate for carrying on a conversation across a canyon.

“I worra skirt today,” she serially told all her friends, not to mention the dozen or so other passengers on the bus. Ad nauseum.

She treated this declaration as though it were the major world news event of the day. She then mentioned that Lonnie (relationship unspecified) told her “you look guud!”

Turning to less personal matters, she went on to comment on the weather. She used the word “purty” more often than not.

After she pocketed her phone, she put up her feet on the sideways seat in front of her and demurely covered her legs with the jacket she’d been wearing. Maybe Lonnie’s the jealous type.

A few stops later, a Goth-looking, high-school-aged girl took a seat across the aisle from Blabby Abby, who attempted to engage her in a conversation by pointing out a thread hanging off one of her black garments. The girl smiled at her, glanced downward, and then studiously turned her head away to gaze out the window. Blabby, eager to continue talking, tried to re-establish eye contact – even flashing the girl several smiles. To no avail.

Then an incoming phone call really got her started.

“Alex told Mike to stay away from me and Miranda. She’s nothing but a liar,” she announced, in a rapid patter usually heard only from play-by-play announcers of hockey games.

Alex, I assume, is short for Alexandra. And, unfortunately, I don’t know where Miranda and Mike fit in.

From there it was an increasingly wearying harangue about being harassed, threatening to call the police, and imagined scenes of confrontation. All involving the aforementioned, and obviously detested, Alex.

As the world turns!