I don’t know about your office, but in ours, we have this corner with an average sized round table where we (officemates) gather during our break, have our coffee or snacks, and talk about something to smile or laugh about. That is one of our ways to eliminate stress from the pressure at work. And it works every time.
We talk about anything around the smooth edge of the table. Topics vary from local to international entertainment industry news, latest happenings of an officemate’s life, or just anything that has a smack of humor in it.
Just few hours ago, we were gathered for our break and not very oddly, really, we talk about theft in the city. It’s not an odd topic because we always have odd topics, too. And there is always humor in such topics, no matter how serious it seems to be.
I don’t know how it started but it was opened. Round table gathering is supposed to be an open discussion style (just as what King Arthur intended it to be when he created the Knights at the Round Table, or so I believe it was that way). But our break is rather short, and the one who opened the topic was intensely into her story we could do no more than listening to her.
And you know what happens when you are just listening to someone? You kind of drift off from what is told and change focus involuntarily. You will find yourself watching the person’s mouth as s/he speaks—how small or wide it opens— and the little showers of saliva (sorry) as the person speaks in hasty enthusiasm. You will notice the eyes, squinting, bulging, and speaking more meanings than the words utter. You will notice the texture of the skin of the person talking, the color, the lines, the warts, the whiteheads and all that skin troubles you never noticed before. You will notice every part of the person talking, if that person is an interesting speaker. Boring talker will just make you sleepy. An enthusiastic person will allow you to see that person’s body part individually, and you kind of take the journey to try to analyze what’s beautiful and what’s not in there.
And then, when you see the speaker as a collection of individual parts again, when you see how the overall impact of the different body parts make the person attractive or unattractive, you will come back to your senses, back to the message told by the speaker. And that’s what happened to me at the round table earlier. And when I was back to what was said by the story-teller, the example theft is already about petty theft in jeepneys.
If you’re not from the Philippines, you may not know exactly what Jeepney is. But you can always google that. Why I’m rambling here is because that particular detail of the story shared at the round table reminded me of my own work of short fiction that has something to do with Jeepney rides.
You may want to read about it, so here is the link of my other rambling that contains link of the story. Or you may go directly to my story and click the title here, A JEEPNEY RIDE
AnythingGoes!☺ 