just somebody that you used to know.

Yesterday, my new thing was to go to a graveyard and catalogue death dates, age at death, the type of decoration on the grave, and if the gravestone marker held some type of description of the person at rest.

Morbid!

It was for class. Doing morbid things for class is a new one too, but I think it's all one package.

And today, my new thing was to talk to absolutely anyone that came within a three foot radius of me. It was an interesting one for a lot of reasons - usually, when I go downtown, I get engrossed in a book or my music or... you know. Anything but the people around me. Actually, not usually... usually, the morning coffee makes me into a gregarious, outgoing soul, so I talk to the first person I see on the bus that smiles at me. If they snub me, it's a book day. If they don't, it's a meet-some-strangers day. I don't do this methodically, I only just realized that this is usually how it goes.

So I worked today at the shoestore, and talked and talked and talked. I tried not to keep the conversation on shoes. I talked about Pixar and Wall-E, the Raven and the books I had recently. I talked about Paris and England and collecting things. People told me all sorts of things as well - a man told me he was going back to university to get another bachelor's - he was fifty. Another guy was annoyed that I was taking the interest off of shoes. I poked fun at our strange store's decorations with some of the younger folk, and I told fake attributes of what the shoes could do for you, as in, "those shoes are 400 dollars because they will whisper to you if you are lonely." Or, "The rubber is quite light - if NASA decides to allow it, they might get activated - it's anti-gravity rubber." I sold the most shoes. I also took a new way back to the bus station because I didn't want to talk to all of the strange people that populate the Santa Cruz streets at night.

On the bus home, I talked to a couple people that told me to come to their CEOs and Corporate Hos (Hoes? Ho's? 'ho's?) party. And I tried to talk to the guy next to me once they got off the bus, but he didn't want to talk at all. He just snubbed me. I stayed on the bus for the UCSC loop just to try more, but I think I really annoyed him. He was listening to Millencolin on his Zune, and if I want to be shallow, I could say it's for the better. Who wants to talk to someone who has a Zune?

But I was actually kind of hurt. I was really nice and he was not.