Eavesdropping
Rather unexpectedly, I spent some time in New York — a last-minute work trip. I booked my flight about two weeks in advance and my hotels the week before I landed at JFK. I had work on Thursday and Friday but extended my flight through Sunday to try and find some time to explore the city or meet some friends. Stepping off the turbulent flight on a Wednesday night, I had few plans solidified but looked forward to seeing where things would go.
My workdays went off without a hitch: we aligned stakeholders prodigiously, in ways that can only be accomplished by sitting in a conference room that smells like bagels for hours on end. After the end of the two days, I was exhausted and ready to get out of Manhattan. I took the L train to Williamsburg to my next hotel, standing in silence as the subway screeched through the tunnels.
Without initially realizing it, I hadn’t worn my headphones at all in New York in my first few days. After hours and hours of listening to music and podcasts on my flight, and hours and hours of talking to my coworkers, my brain desired the ambience of the world in favor of more stimulation. This was atypical, to say the least — usually when I’m tired, I seek to minimize the amount of time I can hear anyone or anything around me, needing a podcast or a song to energize me towards action. But not during this trip.
After going to my hotel, I went to my favorite pizza place, L’Industrie, which always seems to have a massive line to order and just as long of a wait to get your order. With a dying phone and plans to meet a friend after I ate, I decided that I needed to wait things out without the digital. Instead, surrounded by groups of people all around me, I chose to eavesdrop on whoever was close to me.
In an hour’s wait, you can learn a lot about strangers, like the two men with accents behind me who only seemed interested in talking about everything they could order to eat and drink or the Korean guy explaining how he lost thirty pounds after leaving home because his mother was such a good cook. I tried to picture him heavier, but I barely saw what he looked like. I wondered if he was happier now, or if he missed his mom’s cooking.
At some point, my hunger took over, and all I could focus on was trying to figure out if the next order was mine. When my burrata slices came out, I pounced to grab them and moved to a dark corner to inhale them in peace, hoping no one would see where the cheese stuck to my nose and the sauce dripped onto my jacket.
My eavesdropping continued for the rest of the trip: as I joined my friend later, she told me that she’d overheard enough from the table over to deduce that the couple at the table were on a first or second date. When we started to talk about our favorite movies of 2023, we heard them start to do the same. The woman didn’t like Past Lives very much, so our conversations weren’t the only things we had in common.
I wondered if they had heard us talking and started to talk about movies too, or if we’d subconsciously heard their conversation and followed their example. Or maybe it was the fact that the bar was showing some random Japanese monster movie on the projector pointed at the wall. But here we were, sharing physical space, talking about the same thing, and maybe taking turns listening to each other on purpose or on accident. Even as the tall walls of booths separated us, there was a uniting experience even as strangers, as voices, faceless but similar.
I think about the cocktail party effect: the psychological phenomenon where people can filter out the noise of a loud room to hear the person they’re talking to but still pick up if someone mentions their name. Ears pick up sounds all around, but the brain makes decisions on what’s important and what’s not. Isn’t it delightful that maybe a stranger feels important enough to be heard sometimes, even over the din of the crowd?
At a cafe, I heard two people talking about Paris, Texas (1984), a favorite movie of the friend from before. I knew the movie was relatively well known, but it felt significant that one instance of eavesdropping felt connected to another. As if keeping my ears open created opportunities to feel connected to the larger web of those around me. According to the two at the table, apparently Paris, Texas is a real place, along with Paris, Tennessee.
Even as I’ve found myself talking to strangers more in recent months, I never thought to interrupt anything I heard while in New York. The novelty of it all was plenty, left me feeling like I was watching little vignettes of a story written by an unseeable author uninterested in plot but big on imagery and specificity.
I read about Kazuo Oga, the painter of many Studio Ghibli backgrounds, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how he talked about photographs as a part of his process:
Photographs alone can’t convey the atmosphere or the scale. When you actually go, you see the way mist rises from the valleys. You have to see the way the mist looks with your own eyes. Later you can use what you’ve seen as a point of departure for your creativity. With photos, you can’t judge how conditions change through time.
Photographs fail to account for much of the small details of a landscape, of reality as a whole. And what about photographs of people, of places, of restaurants, of bars, of food? What exists beyond what the lens captures?
The conversations had there, by us, by them, the smells and tastes. The oiliness of the scallion pancake and desire for a napkin. The way the two men who were reading and eating shared a drink with the bartender.
And what do we miss with ears plugged, with attention narrowed from the world? Do I spend as much time staring at street signs across the city? Do I notice the enormous rat that runs beside me as I walk home in the dark, trying to keep warm like I’m pretending to be Bob Dylan? Do I hear the angelic voice of the singer with the drums in the subway station, even if it was just for a moment before the train comes in?
With my ears closed, do I feel like I move through the world a little differently, a little more entwined in the web made of everyone, in awe of what I might’ve missed?
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💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - jan 24 - I feel like this month went on forever and I listened to a ton of music
FILM - Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) - Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio! Possibly my favorite Tarantino film
POEM - “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright - The cowbells follow one another / Into the distances of the afternoon.