London, trains, and boogers

There is a man across from me on this train with his finger so far up his nose I’m worried he might accidentally nip brain matter.

From the looks of him, it wouldn’t be the first time.

He clearly thinks lifting the Tom Clancy novel high enough covers this semi-scandalous activity.

There’s a wedding ring on his finger.

That’s a lucky lady awaiting him at home, that’s all I can say.  I bet she’s prepared some dinner, got a big smile on her face, and probably has no idea her husband digs for nasal gold on public transportation.

Wait, I bet she knows.

Maybe she just doesn’t care.

Maybe that’s what marriage is.  Not caring if your partner pokes around in various orifices in public, provided the holes in question are on their own body and not somebody else’s….

I wonder if he does that in bed.  Laying there next to her, flicking his crusty friends off the side.  Inevitably, they pile up in the carpet, a carnage of days past.  She lies there, next to this, engrossed in episodes of reality tv.

She’s probably not innocent in this either.  Any woman who lets her husband think that Tom Clancy can hide his booger fest 2012 probably has quite a few questionable habits lurking on her end of the dining table.

Maybe they do it together.  Maybe they were having problems, nearing divorce, and they decided to hit up counseling.  Maybe the counselor suggested team-building activities.  Sitting up late one night, they got to talking.  Ideas flowing, their interest in finding an activity they could share sparked something they’d thought lost.

The thought of breaking social convention via nose-picking seemed exciting.  Relatively harmless, yet still frowned upon.

Yea, I bet they discovered picking their noses together.  A secret revolting ritual no one else understands.  Maybe he’s going to go home and announce he managed to pull one over on the blonde girl sitting across from him on the train.

He’ll proudly tell the love of his life that the mystery girl across from him had no idea what he was up to.  Working like a spy, he managed to unhook the little devil from the depths of his nose from behind Clancy.

A regular 007.

She’ll tell him she got a good one in the cereal aisle of the grocery store.  Oh the stories they’ll share, this married couple.

I guess I’ll just let him keep thinking he’s pulling this off.  If it’s for love, after all, why bother interrupting.  Not to mention I can’t identify a bonus to announcing to someone that you’re aware of their activities.  It’s not like I’m the booger police after all.

Now, if he was free-farting, I might have a problem.  God help the couple that does that on public transportation for the sanctity of marriage.

Oh good, I just got to London.

Maybe I’ll let Zilla out of the suitcase to roam a bit.

Hopefully she won’t tell this guy she saw his activities.

I’d hate to break up a happy marriage after all.

Bob, Robert, and the truth

Last July a tiny snail crawled it’s way out onto the wall of my living room from some lilies in the corner.  He didn’t make it very far in the heat, and proceeded to either a) die on the wall, or b) take a nine month snooze.

Yes, that is how long he has been on the wall, or had been until this morning-but I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I said he was tiny but I should have said nearly microscopic.  This is important because I don’t want you thinking I would let giant snails continue to live on the wall of my apartment.  He was quite cute, and since I wasn’t sure at first if he was dead or alive, I figured he could just hang out and avoid mingling with Parisian restaurants.  I had no intention of initiating long-term scarring on the little guy.

So instead I named him Bob, but called him Robert (pronounced Ro-bear in French) on Thursdays and Sundays -for no real reason except that I have always liked those days and figured he’d appreciate a little formality now and again.  Sometimes I would pass the wall and see him, raise a mock high-five, and yell out:

“salut Robert’, or ‘hey Bob’ (depending on the day)

Sometimes I would forget he was there.

About three days after I initially spotted him, I figured he was dead.  Still, I  decided he could stay.  It’s Paris, he’s a snail.  Seemed to fit somehow.

Until today.

Today my friend got close to Bob and prepared his standard greeting to my seemingly-shelled roommate, when suddenly, said friend uttered:

‘Ry, are you serious?  Have you ever actually looked closely at this so-called snail?’

So I responded, quite rationally:

‘Well not really, I mean he’s not much to look at, is he?  Too small to really see much of anything’

I continued talking but quickly realized that my friend was gazing at me with a look generally reserved for the long pause before explaining reproduction to children.  He was preparing a biology lecture, just not one involving snails.  Mucus yes, snails-no.

‘Ryan, Bob is a booger.  You’ve been greeting a booger-FORMALLY greeting a booger for the past nine months.  This is disgusting.’

At first I didn’t believe him.  How could Bob be a booger?  My little Parisian friend?  Robert?  Not the mucus I had imagined, but a variety of that only far, far worse?

And then I looked closer.

My cartoonish picture of Bob will never again include a small happy snail with wiggly eyes and a round shell.  Now it will forever conjure images of whichever idiot stood in my living room and chose to pick their nose, then flick the findings onto my wall.

You’ll remember that I utilized the adjective cute in the description of a booger.  A booger.

This dear readers, is truly the life of the unemployed.

Next time I think there’s a snail, I’m grabbing a sponge and re-evaluating the company I keep.