Real life: stranger than fiction

I used my day off Monday to go shopping in Tysons Corner. I’ve been working on a new wardrobe lately and you can’t shop in Northern Virginia long without spending money in that 500-store orgy of consumerism. But shopping isn’t the topic of today’s post. The topic is instead a horribly appalling conversation I overheard on the bus while coming home from my spending binge. I wasn’t going to blog about it, but I’ve been thinking a little more diversity in posts would be good and Aimee thought this would be funny. Blame her if you need therapy after...

I'm seated on the bus headed home from Tysons. Near me two young women in their mid twenties, obviously friends, are casually talking. The women are perfectly normal looking. Well dressed, attractive, professional. They’re probably on their way home from work in one of the skyscrapers. I’m not trying to eavesdrop, but they’re talking loudly and one of them has a shrill voice that cuts through the crowd. It’s impossible not to hear them.

The women are talking about their love lives - about how all their relationships fail to work out. Based on their interactions with other passengers they strike me as unnecessarily rude, so I don’t wonder why the two of them have such bad luck in the dating game.

Out of the blue one of them starts talking about her grandparents - how they were cousins and how that was considered perfectly normal back then and didn’t seem to hurt anybody, so no one cared. Upon hearing that, the other woman begins to talk about the potential for birth defects in incestuous pregnancies and how yes, in fact, it does hurt people. The first woman, however, has had an epiphany and before the second can get very far in her counter argument, the first is rolling again. It has just occurred to her that her brother is nicer and better looking than any of the losers she’s dated, so she should just get with him and be done with it.

She wants to "know" her brother. In the biblical sense.

A joke, right? Poor taste, not funny, but it had to be a joke, right? I don’t think so. After hearing that, the second woman was visibly uncomfortable and stopped talking to the first completely. The ride continued in awkward silence, passenger’s jaws firmly on the floor. Finally I got off the bus, took a deep breath and shivered the willies out of me.

Tags: funny society