Do You Ever Eavesdrop? 4/30

 Prompt: Do you ever eavesdrop?

                               Joseph Bond
I’d like to think my ears are normal size. They fit well underneath every pair of headphones I’ve owned, and any earbuds have slipped in perfectly fine. I have friends with bigger (Isaak) or smaller (Ben) ears than me, yet none of them can hear like I can. I’ll be sitting in the lounge, hear something crazy, and turn to my friends, expecting them to react the same, yet there they sit emotionless. To me, eavesdropping is usually accidental - a byproduct of my excellent hearing - yet that is not to say I don’t enjoy it, or even employ it to my benefit occasionally. Whether waiting on the bus, drifting off in class, or walking in public, I catch glimpses of conversations. To me, eavesdropping is more than a hobby or a form of entertainment, but a way to better connect myself to the community around me.

Flashback to Mexico, 2017. I’m 10 years old, and the family is in Cancun visiting step-pyramids and coral reefs. As we didn't have a car, our main form of transportation were public tour buses, filled with American, but also Mexican tourists. Along with eavesdropping, my other talents include speaking Spanish, and that came in handy here. While people chatted on the phone behind me, I learned all about their upcoming appointment with the podiatrist, plans for the night, and the bald man sitting in front of them with a really bad sunburn on his head (my dad). I turned to let him know, but it seems he already knew, scratching the peeling skin off his head already.

There’s something kind of intimate about overhearing other people’s conversations. You get to hear things that they usually wouldn’t admit. Feelings of sorrow, love, anger. It makes you rethink why we’re so secretive about the things we say or feel to strangers, when in reality they’re all people just like us with their own stories to tell. 

And yet in that secrecy lies an ethical dilemma. One of my oldest addictions was sneaking into my sister’s room and reading her diary. Just like reading my sister’s diary, sometimes these conversations contain things people don’t want to be heard, or things you don’t want to hear. I’ve heard tales of family members dying, relationships ending, even my middle school history teacher’s credit card number (I wrote it down but later erased it out of guilt). I think that’s why few people admit to eavesdropping and why it carries such a negative connotation. 

I’ll share one more funny story, this time with a buddy. Me and Dan were sitting at a table in CIF, preparing for a calculus exam. Next to us, we see a guy stroll up, and begin chatting to a girl. He clearly is trying to make a move on her, but she keeps pushing back. Through it all, we’re trying to hold in our laughter as every excuse to talk to her gets shut down. It all culminates when the girl sneezes, and the guy asks “Do you always sneeze like that?” We burst out laughing, and he walks away embarrassed. Maybe not our most surreptitious eavesdropping, but funny nonetheless. 

Eavesdropping, for all its moral guilt, lets me look into the lives of other strangers, family members, and friends. While my ears may be average sized, they give me a larger than normal perspective on the world around me. In the future I’ll continue to listen, hopefully not invade, other people’s conversations, and maybe learn a thing or two about what pickup lines not to use.