Sunday, February 21, 2010

Verbatim

My mother, yesterday afternoon: "Do you hear someone drumming?"

I listen for a moment and say, "Yeah, I hear it too. There's someone playing drums in the park across the street."

"Oh good," my mother replies. "For a moment, I was afraid I was turning into the Master."

*


Woman talking on cellphone at 1st Street and Second Avenue:

"And she said girl, your face is red, your eyes are glassy, and you're swaggering. And I said whoa! what do you want from me?"

*


A sighted woman and a blind man are walking down Lafayette Street towards the Astor Place Tower.

The woman says "I wish you could see this building."

The man says "I don't need to see it. I can hear it. It sounds terrible."

4 comments:

  1. Your mother is so cool.

    Hmmm, can Time Lords change gender?

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  2. So Daredevil has it all wrong -- blind people's sense of hearing stays the same, but their sense of humor is heightened. Good to know.

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  3. Jeff: If so, what would that make me?

    J.M.: I dunno, that guy did sort of remind me of Matt's blind mentor Stick. But yeah, I've rarely seen a blind character in fiction who showed anything like the wit of blind folks in RL. Well, maybe Gene Hackman in Young Frankenstein.

    (And a P.S. to J.M.: send me an e-mail sometime, okay? Something I wanna ask you.)

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  4. An addendum to the post: I was expecting someone to question whether "swaggering" in the second quote was a typo for "staggering" -- but the woman in question did in fact say swaggering. I liked that. Staggering is what bad actors and comedians do to convey a cliche of drunkenness. Actual drunk people often have inflated feelings of self-aggrandizement and walk around with aggressive hyper-confidence...in a word, swagger. So even if it was a mistake and she meant to say the more obvious word, the way it came out was better.

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