Habits of the British: My two (half Sudanese) (half British) friends.

It’s interesting being around my two (half Sudanese) (half British) friends, since they're some of the only people I've known from  Britain who I've ever been around on a regular basis.

Both talk about very very small things, or notice and linger over the mundane.

I remember like half a year ago, I had a drink with the sister of the 2, and after a serious conversation about her perhaps leaving her job for a better one, she began telling me in detail about an abcess in her ear, and the lengths she had to go to to get it drained.

A few weeks ago, I ran into the brother of the 2 at the gym.

“Look,” he was like, and pointed a finger at a New Yorker cover of gowned graduates standing on broken ice floes like penguins.

Then, he continued to look at it and didn’t say more since he was absorbed by the picture that most other people just glanced at once and then went on with their lives.

We synched up again between sets, and when I went up to chat, he was now somewhere in the magazine, look at it attentively.

“I don’t get it,” he was like, pointing at a cartoon with an obscure caption as he kept looking at it, trying to get it.

 . . .

“They’re like old people,” my one friend from high school who runs an integrated women’s / domestic violence shelter once told me, when I was describing my (British) friends’ habits to her.