Monday, August 30, 2004

Lunch Break

It is the little details that are so interesting to me, the small scale theater glimpsed out of the corner of my eyes. I took my lunch break in a room on the third floor of the Ramada Inn this afternoon. The air conditioner was white noise behind me as I watched the final round of a golf tournament on the TV. My shoes were off revealing my holey socks wrapped around my feet which were propped up and resting on the bed. I was feeling guilty pleasure nibbling on a McDonald's hamburger (which didn't quite taste the same with the thick aroma of hotel air freshener hanging in the air). Out of the corner of my eye, outside in the parking lot below, I saw the front desk girl taking out the garbage.
I was stunned that she had left her post talking on the phone in the cool comfortable lobby, to empty the trash. But there she was, her cell phone pressed to her ear with one hand, and a dripping bag of garbage in the other. I was amazed that this pretty petite blond girl was doing physical labor in such a snazzy outfit, (pin-striped black pants and a blue button up blouse). I would have forgotten about the whole episode after 2 minutes if it weren't for the added drama. As the front desk girl was frolicking over the asphalt with her cell phone and her garbage bag, a half naked college guy was sitting in his lawn chair tanning across the street and was throwing some awfully sly looks towards Desk Girl.
Sun Bathing is very hard to sell as a constructive activity, unless a blonde girl on a cell phone walks by, then it becomes a mating ritual. Anyway, the college stud had repositioned himself in his chair so that he could get the best possible view of Desk Girl and she could get the best view of him. His eye brows were contorting all over his forehead as he experimented with a variety of facial expressions. I thought that surely Desk Girl was as repulsed as I was by Naked Boy but she showed no signs of repulsion. Actually, she turned into quite the performer, pretending that the dumpster lid was to heavy to lift, and that her helpless feminine body was ill equipped to do such dirty work. She threw back her head and laughed into her cell phone demonstrating how fun and happy she was while simultaneously revealing the bounce and vigor of her healthy blond hair. She was digging every minute of attention she was getting. She never made eye contact with Naked Boy and eventually skipped back across the blacktop and disappeared back into the hotel. My eyes darted back to Naked Boy who was in the process of ending his fantasies and resuming his career as a sun bather. I took another bite of hamburger, and resumed watching the golf tournament on TV.

1 comment:

rebekah said...

people do the funniest things when they think people are watching. and when they think people aren't watching.

i have notebooks filled with such episodes.

people are strange...