I went to a nail salon this afternoon to get a pedicure. I was wearing denim shorts and a black t-shirt that displayed on the front in white lettering, simply, the word meh. (All in lower case.) I bought this shirt from ThinkGeek because in the Britcom The IT Crowd (of which Im a HUGE fan), the character Roy wore this exact t-shirt, and I loved it :) : bite.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/meh.png I sat down to let my toenails dry in the ultraviolet light (which may or may not actually do anything), and just a moment after I sat down, another woman with fresh toenail polish sat on the stool next to me. She looked to be in her mid-60s to early 70s (although I suck at guessing age, so if shes actually 50 and reads this, Ill feel terrible). She was *very* polished, professional-looking, cultured, sophisticated... I was still in the process of getting settled, and was planning to browse the net on my phone, when she said, Excuse me, but what does meh mean? I didnt quite process the sentence, or whether it was for me, so I looked at her questioningly, and she immediately repeated the question. She then said that shed seen this a couple of times and didnt know what it meant. She said, Is it a thing? I spend so much time on the net (on sites like Facebook) where people have been using this interjection for so long that it just seems like a normal word, and it never occurred to me that anyone would ask me this question. I blinked a couple of times, then started to smile, then started to laugh. I shrugged my shoulders and said out loud, meh. She just looked at me, not quite comprehending. I said it again, with a slightly different inflection to express a slightly different sentiment. I then said it over and over, with a slightly different inflection each time, to show the versatility of the word and the actually quite wide range of sentiments that it can convey. After I did this several times, she said, Thats what it means? meh? (And she shrugged her shoulders with just the right expression of mediocre indifference.) I smiled and said, Yep. :) She then did it a couple more times, settling into grokking the sense of the word and the sort of emotion (or lack thereof) it can convey. I felt really self-conscious and vaguely embarrassed during all of this because she *did* appear sophisticated and cultured, and compared to her, I just looked ridiculous, as did my display. I had no idea how to respond to her question, so this was me winging it. After several moments of awkward silence, I smiled and said, Its an internet thing. People say it all the time on social networking sites or talking to each other in comments and stuff. She said, People actually say that? I said, Yeah... its a geek thing. (Were mostly geeks in here in one way or another, arent we?) She said, I dont go onto the internet. I wouldnt want to spend my time like that. I mean, I use it to type up reports, but I wouldnt want to just spend time there, given what I do. I processed that sentence for a second or two, and it led directly to the obvious follow-up question: What do you do? She said, Im a bereavement counselor. That stopped me cold. After several seconds of social shock, I looked squarely at her, and said, Thats amazing. I completely understand why you wouldnt want to hang out on the internet. You need to interact with *actual people*. She said the word people when I did, while nodding and smiling in agreement. I smiled and said, You need to be with people, not pixels. She smiled and said, Exactly. I then said, meekly, Im a software engineer. Im on the computer all day long. Its just... where I am... its normal. Eventually, she said, Thats a great shirt... for you. The pause between shirt and for was actually quite short, but as perceptible as the previous ellipsis. I processed the various possible implications of this sentence over perhaps 2-3 seconds, and then did the only thing I *could* do: I smiled broadly at her and said, Thank you. The conversation then turned back to her profession, and I displayed (what I hope was) unmistakable reverence. She said, Its just people. Everyone experiences loss in one way or another. She brought up various kinds of loss, like family members, friends, etc., and we discussed this for a bit. She then said, Even loss of memorabilia... This struck a different sort of chord. I opened my eyes a bit more widely and said, The pictures of our 9-week backpacking trip across Europe. She said, What? I repeated the sentence, and then I explained that when I was 21, I backpacked across Europe for nine weeks with two friends. Any time one of us had our pictures developed, we made three copies, so we could each have one. And over the following years, all three of us lost them. I told her that I was as certain as I could be that my copies of the pictures were in a trunk in our basement (this was during my marriage), along with the diaries I filled up during the trip, and when I moved and unpacked, the diaries were right where I expected them, but there wasnt a single photograph with them, or in any of the boxes I had shipped. She said, Thats quite a loss. I thought about it for a couple of seconds, and about the fact that even though the photographs are gone, I still had the experience (which is, of course, what really matters), and I smiled at her and said, meh. :) She said, Its not really that big of a loss, because you still have the memories of the actual experience. I smiled and nodded in agreement. We continued to have one of the most amazing spontaneous conversations with a stranger Ive ever had... Our respective trips to Europe, our impressions of Parisians, our visits to Rome, the boys we met there... (She said wistfully that she could still remember his name, Gianni. I immediately gasped and said, Thats mine, too! His name was Gianni!) She told me about her education as a young teenager in Montreal, about learning French there and the differences between the accents in Quebec and France... we even discussed Quebec French profanities (almost as interesting as Cockney rhyming slang)... There was so much conveyed during this conversation, *so* many vast images, deep emotions, complex ideas and concepts, etc., that I would have thought wed talked for *hours*, but doing the math in my head, I dont think it could have been much longer than 25 minutes, which Im having problems wrapping my brain around... Its as though we were encased in a bubble outside of which time had stopped, and we were allowed to continue our conversation. She was so remarkable and intense, and this meeting felt sort of... deliberate. It reminded me a bit of... well, lets just say, she felt like an angel. :) I just wish Id had the presence of mind to suggest that we exchange contact information before shed walked out the door.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 06:01:41 +0000
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