Overheard Conversation Post

      Tonight around seven pm I find myself sitting in the Starbucks located in the Barnes and Noble bookstore. I have ordered myself a caramel frappuccino and sit down at a nearby table to sip my iced coffee drink and play spy. After sitting for a while a group of students enter and make their way over to a table next to me and begin to remove there laptops and textbooks. Having already pulled out my notebook and my Political Economics book, in an attempt to look like I was paying attention to something else, I grabbed my pen and perked my ears up to listen. It only took a few minutes for the students to talk before the conversation grew and took on a life of it's own. This is what I witnessed.

      Five students are sitting around a table. Three of them are males and and they are accompanied by two young and peppy women. They are high-school students or maybe college freshman, I cannot be sure. At first it is fairly quiet, with the kind “Hello” followed by a “How's it going?”, then the conversation gets interesting.

“You know you wanna see the pictures!”, says a boy loudly to a girl close to him.

“No. Seriously, I don't wanna know what you guys do when your alone.” the girl replies.

“You don't wanna see pictures of me a Will on our secluded cabin weekend? It took me forever to get him to go.”

The girls mumbles something, mostly inaudible.

“It was great, no one around and its just me and my roommate! I'm telling ya as soon as we got there we started heating the place up. Poured some of that champagne, and got under the blankets! Oh yeah!”

“He's huge, smelly and he has those weird teeth.” states the girl.

“No seriously, just listen.” says the boy.

                 Here is what I got from it.

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      A boy and his huge, smelly, vampire roommate, Will, in a effort to escape the chains of their average boring days off escape to a secluded cabin for a more interesting weekend together. Upon arriving the boy professes his love for his smelly, huge, vampire roommate, cracks a bottle of Moet and Chandon, and proceeds to pour glasses for the two of them. Soon they are completely wasted and find themselves under the blankets and “heating the place up”. In order to preserve this precious moment the two of them then proceed to take pictures of themselves together, to show their friends and maybe even a few for themselves.

●◌●

      Now, I am sure that this was not what really happened but, I cannot know that just by what I heard. I imagine that the boy just has a roommate that creeps out the girl because he is heavy and smelly and has bad teeth. I am fairly sure that when they arrived at the cabin, it was freezing and they threw wood on the fire, jumped under blankets while they waited for the place to heat up and had some champagne to celebrate the weekend.  However, without the proper context I am sure this conversation could be heard or understood in many ways. None of which are right.  It would also seems that tone and pronunciation also work together in order to help build the correct context in spoken language.  Without the correct context we all sound about one banana short of a bunch!