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Weird Things I Overheard On The Streets Of Beirut
The good old Lewis Black said it best once. He overheard a young woman saying, “If it weren’t for my horse, I never would have spent that year in college.” Now take a moment, because it doesn’t make much sense upon first listen. Or second. It doesn’t make much sense at all.
As Black said, “Don’t think about that too long, or blood will shoot out your nose!”
What I love about living in a city are these snippets of conversations. They are comedic and intellectual gold. I could write a book using only these lines of conversations I overhear (don’t steal that idea, because it’s already in the works) or write a whole standup sketch using jumbled lines of dialogue (I’m not much of a performer so you can steal that one).
Here are some of the things I have heard recently.
– “My lab partner is a bossy bitch.”
When I heard this one, “I’m a boss ass bitch, bitch, bitch,” started playing in my head. I imagined a boss ass bitch who wears a feathered boa and stilettos to lab despite the safety rules. Screw those basic goggles, she’s fabulous.
– A man in the morning: “I emailed her looking for a job and she wrote back saying, ‘There are no jobs.’”
– A woman in the evening, on the complete other side of town: “He emailed me looking for a job so I wrote back saying, ‘There are no jobs.”
When this happened I turned around in slow motion. I felt like I had to bend backwards like Neo from the Matrix.
– “This girl told me I look like Taylor swift, what do you guys think?”
I never did find out what what they thought.
– “I couldn’t go to her birthday because I had to move my beehive. I’m serious guys.”
I really believed the guy. Somehow, he made it sound authentic, real, and very painful. He had to move the damn bees guys. Birthdays can wait. Bees do not.
– “Your life can change, like in the blink, of like, an eye. So you can’t, like, plan anything. Like, at all.”
– “Yeah, but I had like, a 20 year plan.”
– “Yeah, but like, you can’t.”
I heard this on a bus. If you think about it, these girls are right. They’re on to something. You can’t make a 20 year plan. You just, like, can’t. It, like, doesn’t work that way, like.
– “It’s like BDSM meets space meets cowboys!”
I was sitting on a bench in AUB, enjoying some sunshine and a hot cup of coffee when I overheared an excited boy and girl discussing something both erotic and Western with great zeal. Intrigued, I attempted to eavesdrop, but, alas, I was too late, and they ran off to class. Later that week, I watched Haifa Wehbe’s music video for “Breathing You In” and was immediately mentally transported back to that bench. I almost wish the mystery had remained.