People Watching

Description: Middle aged woman wearing a long flowered dress with sandals and a long brown hand bag hanging off of her shoulder.  She has long frizzy gray hair that floats behind her as she walked.
Interpretation:  She looked to be in a hurry, as if to be aggravated at someone or something that had just happened.

Description: Young teenage boy wearing skinny jeans with a chain hanging out of his front right pocket.  He is wearing all black with a red and black hat to match his outfit.  Also listening to music through headphones.
Interpretation: He appeared to be completely oblivious to his surroundings and only focused on what he was looking at on his phone.  He looked as if he was trying to give off a rebellious look.

Description: A brunette teenage girl wearing black rimmed glasses, a white tank top, exercise pants, flip flops and pearl earrings.  She had an interesting way of walking almost as if she was strutting on a runway.  She was also talking on the phone.
Interpretation: She had a very bright facial expression and appeared to be having a happy conversation on the phone with whoever she was talking to.  She seemed as if she was living care free with nothing going wrong at that moment.

Description: An elderly couple walking out of Sears.  The gentleman wearing a button down shirt and high waisted dress pants and sneakers.  The Woman wearing black pants and a pink wool sweater with a duck on the front.
Interpretation: The couple was only focused on one another.  The husband was curious and kind to his wife, looking her in the eye every time he spoke and listening intently at every word she spoke.  They had to have been married for a long time by the way were interacting with each other.

Description: A middle aged man with long mangled brown hair wearing multiple shirts and old dirty jeans.  He also had tennis shoes caked with mud, and an untamed beard.
Interpretation:  The man looked to be run down, as if life had gotten the best of him.  He could have possibly been homeless, or simply having a rough day.  He moved in a sluggish way with pain in every step that he took.

 Parking Lot/Reflection:

In all honesty I did not enjoy this assignment in the slightest.  I felt very judge-mental while writing down my observations on people I saw.  I felt this way because I was making inferences about people I had never seen or spoken to before, and in that sense I was pre-judging them.  I went against what my mother told me growing up- I judged a book by its cover as appose to reading the first few pages.  What gives me the right to say whether or not the teenage boy walking through the food court was an ignorant, cocky kid that could care less about who is walking behind him, whether or not he is being courteous or if he is disrupting any one else’s good time in the food court. 

            Although I felt bad writing down my judgments of people, I also thought it was interesting how I was able to attach a story to the way people walked or what they were wearing.  After making that connection, I found that I was divulging much deeper than I should have been able to just by looking at the clothes someone was wearing, or the expression on their face.  It was also interesting to see how some people looked similar and yet they carried themselves in completely different ways.  In all, the scenarios that played in my head were triggered in ways that I had never thought about before, it was an interesting expereicne.