Dear Diary
The streets of Hayward are usually pretty quiet first thing in the morning. I usually have the sidewalks to myself as I walk to the train station to start the morning commute. But today, as I crossed a normally empty street, I saw a young woman making good time on the sidewalk I was crossing to. She was walking faster than I was and I became keenly uncomfortable at the thought of blocking the sidewalk so that she'd have to either slow down or go around.
She managed, though. Walked right into the street and got around me. Which is fine, because in her rush, she missed the two dollars I spotted, staring at the ground as I walked, listening to NPR on the radio.
Those two dollars would buy me a chocolate French donut and a small coffee in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, where I was returning rented microphone equipment. And taking photos of all the graffiti I spotted yesterday, when I rented the equipment in the first place.
Today at work, I failed to tell a knock knock joke to a coworker via an instant messaging program.
Today at work, I ate for lunch a tamale, some chicken teriyaki, a few leafs of lettuce with dressing, a dried out skinny slice of orange, some squid salad.
Today at work, I talked to coworkers about the sweep and range of the Hong Kong gang drama series of films called Young and Dangerous.
I am the sort of person who doesn't write entries like this. On the way home, reading the New Yorker, I read an article about diaries. At first, I thought the article was going to investigate what drove people to diaries, but by the end, it was just lots of excerpts from diaries. I felt that any point was overshadowed by the author's message of "I have read a lot of diaries."
Flashback: In San Francisco's Mission, I also found a book about educating your children about the dangers of sexual abuse (dropped next to a tree in the sidewalk, the title page strangely underlined with marker) and I found part of a letter someone had been writing on tiny, spiral bound pages. It was dirty, but interesting, so I took it with me to read later.
Outside a storage facility, there was a lot of dropped and scattered paper, including some photos. I would have taken the photos to study the lives of these littering strangers, but other people were around, and I'm self conscious about picking up junk when people are watching.
The hardest thing about this diary trick is the voice going [who gives a fuck?] with every typed sentence. Can you hear it? It seems loud enough that you should be able to hear it.