{"id":5071,"date":"2011-05-19T13:21:44","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T18:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=3421"},"modified":"2025-09-06T13:18:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T18:18:10","slug":"people-watching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/people-watching\/","title":{"rendered":"People watching"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Three
Every breath you take and every move you make; Every single day and every word you say, I\u2019ll be watching you.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Yesterday I had surgery for the first time ever (not counting wisdom teeth). It was elective and went well, so everything\u2019s fine.<\/p>\n

Anyway. I very rarely go out. I\u2019m a serious hermit. When I do go out, I avoid people like the plague. I don\u2019t care to be touched or talked at by total strangers. I\u2019m very conscious and protective of my personal space. But.<\/p>\n

I watch.<\/p>\n

Maybe out of the corner of my eye. Maybe I use my ears to see (comes from years and years of transcribing for a living\u2014you get to know people pretty well by voice inflection). Maybe a small gesture catches my eye. It doesn\u2019t happen all the time, but it does happen enough that I get lots of ideas for characterization. I take lots of notes in my head. I\u2019ve even taken notes on paper.<\/p>\n

They never know I\u2019m watching them.<\/p>\n

Years ago, I was eating lunch at a restaurant, reading a book (natch), and three programmers for a medical software company headquartered here were talking in not particularly low tones. They were talking about a software they were selling that controlled the machines that administer insulin doses to inpatients. They\u2019d found a bug that multiplied the dosages many times what was prescribed and it\u2019d killed a few people before they caught it.<\/p>\n

I managed to keep my jaw from dropping on the floor and went for pen and paper with great stealth. (Yes, I still have that conversation written down.) I went home after work and started writing as fast as I could. Before I got the story finished, though, it popped up on Law & Order<\/em>, so I didn\u2019t bother.<\/p>\n

They never knew I was listening.<\/p>\n

So yesterday.<\/p>\n

My preop nurse caught my eye. I don\u2019t know why. She was average height, with curly red-blonde hair, average facial features, and an overweight apple-shaped torso\u2014in short, very similar to how I envision Giselle from The Proviso<\/em> to look. She wasn\u2019t particularly bubbly; she didn\u2019t smile; she was even a bit terse. She was relaxed but confident. She wasn\u2019t ugly nor truly fat. Just\u2026plain. Ordinary. Average. Whatever it was, which I don\u2019t know, it made her very attractive. In fact, I told Dude she was very pretty.<\/p>\n

Next up: My surgeon. He delivered TD #1. Until I went to him last month to say, \u201cI want this procedure,\u201d I never really knew how genuinely caring he is. I\u2019ve very rarely had that from the doctors in my life, but this guy \u2026 I\u2019ve never written a doctor as a character before, mostly because my relationships with them as (by turns) patient, investigator, and vendor have never really been good ones. But now I have a model from which to write one.<\/p>\n

Last: My operative nurse is someone I\u2019ve known for years, from church. At church, she has always been very dour and standoffish. Her husband is affable enough, and he\u2019s our new bishop (THANK HEAVENS!!!). But I\u2019ve never really gotten to know her because of the brick wall she wraps around herself. But yesterday\u2026 Yesterday she was all smiles and genuine warmth and caring. I\u2019ve never seen that before, and now it makes me wonder what about being at church<\/em> makes her spine stiffen and her smile to go away.<\/p>\n

I see people watching people all the time. They sit and watch people go by\u2026 You can tell. It\u2019s the people watchers like me\u2014the ones who seem to not be paying attention to anything around them\u2014who could turn you into a character one day.<\/p>\n

And you will never know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I had surgery for the first time ever (not counting wisdom teeth). It was elective and went well, so everything\u2019s fine. Anyway. I very rarely go out. I\u2019m a serious hermit. When I do go out, I avoid people like the plague. I don\u2019t care to be touched or talked at by total strangers. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[476,656,655,424],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","category-my-process","category-wisdom-to-impart","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5071"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18755,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5071\/revisions\/18755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}