Steve - Watches

Subtitles are weird. For the first minute or so it feels weird to have to glance down every line of dialogue, but after a while it's like you're not even looking, you just soak it up. It feels like you're just hearing it, and indeed it puts itself into my memory that way too.

In fact, that is even more interesting. Consider there to be two parts to speech: the actual sounds, and the meaning. When you're fluent in a language, these are inseparable, but when you're just learning it then you have to almost consciously translate the sounds into their meanings.

Anyway. Perhaps, because there's the meaning there and there's the sound, it's all going through the same places that it would if I understood the speech. Perhaps I am understanding the speech, through mediation.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay, fine. I failed. I'm now on the slippery slope of getting Into anime. Sigh. Eat it up, you bastards.

One other thing I wanted to talk about with regards to this: people. Have you ever been being driven somewhere, a long journey perhaps, through a place you don't know, and looked at the houses with their darkened windows and wondered what kind of people live there? Maybe catching a glimpse of things on their windowsills, maybe even them, in the warm glow of indoor lighting or the pewter sea of reading on an overcast day.

Maybe some of them look out at the cars and wonder what kind of people are in those fish-tank bullets.

There are whole lives packaged up in those houses. Whole beautiful fragile lives, simultaneously sharing a similar space. I wonder what would happen if, everything, the cars, the houses, all of that, were to just disappear one day, while we were passing, and we were left dazed people sitting on damp grass and hot tarmac, joined together by the intimacy of confusion.

I want to know those people. I really really want to. There are so many people, even within a relatively short radius from here, and there have to be some in that group that... are the kind of person I want to know, to touch, to experience life with.

But how can I find them? Even if it were practical to locate them (it probably is), social boundaries keep us apart. What would people think if I were to just approach them in a public space, and engage in conversation with them? At best I'd be a pleasant distraction, at worst I'd be a sexual predator, or make them feel profoundly uncomfortable. Sure, the kind of person I'm looking for might not be that way, but how many restraining orders is it going to take to find them?

And I don't want to go looking in Social Areas either. Clubs or bars or what-the-fuck-ever else. But... when I've left school, uni, and decided not to work (not that work is a great place to meet people anyway), what is there left?

Anyway, got a bit off topic there. Beyond that, there are people in other countries. Like say... oh I don't know, Japan. These people speak a different language to me and have different culture... is it possible for me to relate to them at all? Or for them to relate to me? Can I find love in them, or them in me? How do I find them?

There are too many people alive to hold on to any.