Peoplewatcher

No one knows me better than the keystrokes on my keyboard. A digital notebook, a decade rife with semi-coherent ramblings accented by sans serif fonts. Myself. My emotions. My friends. How my knees hurt, and how my body is exhausted. Endless moments, touched by the coming and going of friends, acquaintances, and lovers. All of these small moments are swept together by things that are constantly impacting myself on a larger scale. My life isn’t just mine, it’s the life of others around me— I’m constantly peeking glances into other people’s lives, and yet they never hold the pen in my notebook. I don’t know what they’re thinking about, how the world is affecting them— maybe they journal about the things I observe too. Maybe by some stroke of chance, they’ve journaled about someone close to me. Maybe we’re both stressed about the same things. Maybe we’re not.

I’ve always been a Peoplewatcher. I’m not sure when my eyes began to wander with such passive curiosity. By freshman year of college, I had begun to know most of my teammates by their walking paces. A lot went into how fast they walked, how loose or uptight they seemed; it was how I’d notice teammates from afar as we walked to practice in the winter, who were only mostly indistinguishable from their bright bags & identical parkas. From there it stemmed on to peoples clothes. Noting cool sweaters, jeans, accessories. Suddenly I’d just be noting people. I’d talk about it on dates and with friends, how I’ll sit next to the window at restaurants so I can look outside, and at parties I’ll hang out on the porch with a view in the window. I get a moment, whether it be 30 seconds or an hour, to make a connection— a story— in my head. Where are they going? What are they doing? There are social media profiles dedicated to logging their people watching with varying degrees of appropriateness. You could argue that what I’m doing is creepy, but in a world where people don’t ask for consent before snapping photos of strangers to post on the internet, often at the person’s expense, I think a personal journal is the best case scenario to be documented.

There was a major shift behind my reasoning to start journaling these stories though. Most times when I’d people-watch before it’d be people I knew to some degree, whether a friend-of-a-friend, an ex, a failed connection, or an old best friend; going to a school of 3,000ish people means you’re always going to be a couple degrees of connection max from any individual. Faces don’t blur as easily as they do in a large city, and sometimes these moments of people watching could influence my mood in drastic ways (God forbid you go to the bar and see that one person who you wish to forget) but now since my move I found that 95% of my people-watching moments were very inconsequential to my life. Of the 5% that stood above that, I’d say maybe half affected my mood minimally, and the other half had a major impact on my day, sometimes even longer.

I’ve become more aware of the category of half-stranger, the limbo between unknown and familiar. Someone you constantly see, hear of, whose patterns you may mimic. A stranger who’s pitbull greets me on my walk every morning. 4 early-risers who take the same bus route as me, but go a few stops farther. I don’t know their names, but I know things about them. I have to piece together the bits I don’t know. I wonder if they do this about me too. What do the cafe workers think of me when I come in on occasion on a saturday to read and watch the other customers. Is my idle observation distinguishable from the half truth of being easily distracted? A stranger who observes and infers about another. Once an older woman— one who I see every morning before work— had something to say to me as I got off the bus. She gave an earnest compliment about the soon-to-fade green highlights that dotted my bang. Not a friend, not a name, but I knew her. She got off 4 stops after I got on. 5 minutes between recurring strangers. She always was incredibly fashionable, I’ve even thought up new outfit combinations due to her, and I told her that. I don’t know her, she doesn’t know me, and yet in that moment we became a little more than just strangers.

As I’ve started to physically note these down, they reveal patterns, categories, labels for a moment. Discomforting, Exciting, Interesting, Amusing. A man relentlessly hitting on me on my bus ride home from work? Discomforting. A visibly butchfemme couple in public? Exciting. A man watching what can only be described as a cheating fantasy story on TikTok? Interesting and amusing. Most of these end up on public transit, and unlike what everyone who doesn’t exist with public transit would tell you, most of them are positive. Sure you’re gonna have some less-than-ideal experiences, that’s just human error and existing in an imperfect world. I’ll tell some of these stories, and the immediate response becomes “public transit is just oh so scary!” or one of the myriad of manufactured forms of disdain. Let me ask you though— if I did take a car to work I’d dodge these horrid but infrequent moments of frustration and discomfort, only for them to be replaced with guaranteed frustration and more likely scenarios that are higher stress— and I wouldn’t even get the chance of something positive. I’d sit in silence with music every morning. I’d think “man I hate this traffic” and not “maybe I could read my book”. I’d always be alone, I’d never have strangers in limbo, just whatever unidentified person cut me off.

So, I’m a Peoplewatcher, an Eavesdropper, a listening ear to a stranger in need, and another rider on the 6:11am bus.

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