A man sitting directly behind me is chatting up the woman next to him.
Man: “Oh, you hurt your finger! Want me to kiss it and make it better?”
Woman: “Huh?”
Man: “You know, like when you were little, and you hurt yourself, and your mom would kiss it to make it better?”
Woman: “No. Mom wasn’t around. My grandma always said, ‘quit your whining and keep moving.'”
Two young women in their late teens/early twenties are talking relationships in the back of the bus.
YW 1: “He’s always asking for presents. He’s like, ‘Buy me this; buy me that.’ I would have bought him that ugly-a** Star Wars poster, but I didn’t want to have to look at it for the rest of my life.”
A woman approaches the shelter, where one man is already sitting alone.
Woman: “Are the buses running today?”
Man: “Nope.”
Woman: “Not even the 48?”
Man: “I don’t think so. I heard there are a bunch of ’em piled up down 23rd.” He pauses and thinks for a moment. “You could try the 14.”
…
Or not.
As I exit the bus at 3rd & Union, the driver calls to me.
“Excuse me, miss. Excuse me!”
I hurry back up the steps, flustered, certain I have either dropped something or somehow managed to forget I’m on a “pay as you leave” route. But the driver is smiling.
“I was just wondering: What is that delicious fragrance you’re wearing?”
Two twentysomethings are sitting in the back, discussing job prospects and financial woes.
Twentysomething woman: “I’ve been hitting up everyone I know that works at Sound Transit, asking them to hook me up with a bus pass. Just hook a girl up! They’re like, ‘dude, we’ll get fired.'”
[…]
Twentysomething man: “You should get, like, a whole bunch of old bus passes–from, like, way back–and sell them for like, five bucks… That’s just the kind of thing liberal douchebags would buy.”
On a recent 8 excursion, Chicklet awoke from her nap (she is fond of napping in the Ergo) directly underneath Metro’s “chill on the cell usage” ad.
After checking it out for a few seconds, she giggled, then turned to me and said one of her latest words: “teeth.”
Funny, that’s what I think when I see it, too.