“Say man, you’re not from around here, are you?”
As I took a millisecond to gauge why that question was being asked, I immediately came to the conclusion that the barista really didn’t have any ulterior motives for asking. With that being said, I wasn’t quite sure where he was coming from, so I just decided to give him a brief synopsis about being born in another country, living in a city south of here, and then ending pretty simply with, “And here I am”.
“Yeah, man, well, you’ve got style, like, a lot of the other people around here don’t have style like yours.”
Again, without thinking too much about where this was all headed, I ended with, “Thanks man!” and took off.
It’s probably the first time my own personal style has been complemented by a completely random dude, and it probably has more to do with my attitude when I’m talking with those people that occasionally make me a coffee drink. After working in food service, my attitude is, “Your job probably sucks, so I’ll try not to be a reason you hate it just that much more.”
The real reason that I tend to think that people ask me that question is because my (southern?) accent is a lot flatter than most around here. Every Texan within hearing distance will immediately snicker, peg me as at least a Yankee, or a foreign import, and then proceed to explain how I’m not anything like a Texan.
“He doesn’t even carry a kn-iii-fe!”
It was really a survival mechanism for when I lived in New Zealand. At an all boy’s school, it was somewhat of a Darwinist survival-of-the-fittest mindset. The weak and timid were mercilessly beaten up. While my temper occasionally got ahead of me, my desire to walk without crutches or casts kept me in line.
Here’s one great example – one time there was a ladder leaning up against one of the buildings (close to the metalshop class room if I recall) *total sidenote, metalshop was a valid class, and had an acetylene tank and everything. I bailed on this class into woodworking thinking I would do better, but turns out I’m allergic to freshly cut wood and varnish. Go figure. So anyway, the ladder is pretty obtrusively leaning on the side of the building in the opening to a hall, and so either you had to really step around it or just easily walk under it. Being the logical guy that I am, I walked under the ladder (no fuss, no muss) and was immediately pummeled in the stomach by some laughing blonde kid. This is the same one that picked on me occasionally, but all I did was give out a big whoosh and kept walking.
Yeah, good times. There was also that time that one of the boarders, uh, relieved himself on one of the small theater’s seats in which we had a house assembly. The room was PACKED and there was a one seat perimeter around it. Whoo, it was bad.
Anyway.