Link: Foodspotting

Foodspotting - A brand new website for posting photos of specific dishes at restaurants. It needs it's iPhone app to release, and it needs more people to add to it!

Overheard on the bus

A blonde little boy about 3 years old was riding the 41 home with his dad tonight. He was such a good little boy, perfectly happy to play excitedly with his daddy's iPhone, occasionally exclaiming at whatever he was seeing onscreen. Who knows, maybe it was nothing. His dad was so nice, just watching the boy play and talking to him quietly.

By the time we crossed Van Ness on Union Street, the boy seemed to know it was time to get off the bus, and he stood up, holding his dad's hand. Again, he was excitable, probably a sudden surge of energy before he went home and crashed in a blaze of toddler exhaustion.

"Yay! Ha ha! Going home, going home! Daddy! Daddy! Are you my daddy?!"

And his dad, without skipping a beat... "I sure hope so!"

The back of the bus stayed quiet for about two seconds and then burst into laughter.

So this is the new year

I'm looking at people around me and hoping, in this new year and decade, that I'm not alone in my desire that everyone be good to one another.

People on the street, on the bus, don't smile at one another. Their faces are cold, but my (perhaps naive) desire is that this is just a protective front, that they don't want to appear vulnerable. I watched a girl stride confidently onto the bus last week on my way home from work. She was petite, dressed in a funky short floral sheath dress and black tights. She immediately began talking to everyone within earshot, engaging them in conversation.

This was strange for a couple of reasons: one, people on that bus just don't talk to one another. They listen to their iPods, they read the news or check their email on their Blackberrys, they don't engage.

The second thing that made this so remarkable was that the people she engaged first were cops. We were in the middle of a fare raid by the Muni police. She stopped, grabbed a pole, and asked earnestly, "Why are there so many of you in here?"

In the face of such a strange interruption, she called bullshit. This was not normal and she wasn't going to pretend it was. It was so different, so wonderful to watch, that I got a little teary. I'm determined now that people just need to call bullshit on the stone faces, the apathy, the lack of warmth. For the whole bus ride home, people around her talked, exchanged names, traded stories. This has never happened before. I wanted to tell those people to promise they would start conversations on the bus every day going forward.

But I didn't. I listened to my iPod, watched silently from the back of the bus, and exited and walked home.