Friday 27 February 2004

Pic of the day: Sometimes you can't talk even if you are alone together, and other times you can't stop talking even if you are miles apart. Humans are strange. (And so are anime characters, here from the anime Daa! Daa! Daa!) Was really the table so enormously wide, the first time we were alone together? I cannot remember, but I don't think so.

The cell phone species

I was walking down the main street of Kristiansand, Markens gate as it is quite fittingly called in Norwegian. (Literal translation would be "Street of the Worm", but it is almost certainly from an older word meaning "market" instead.) As I walked, I noticed a man, younger than me, walking in the opposite direction. He had the looks of a substance abuser, the way they look after they have stopped caring for most other things but before they slide all the way down into hell proper. This may not be so. It may be an affectation of behavior, perhaps to pick up chics. Or simply social awkwardness, not knowing how to look like a well integrated citizen. Perhaps. Or he may actually be an addict. What I did notice beyond the shoddy exterior was him wielding a mobile phone, seemingly reading or possibly writing a short text message as he walked.

And that's when it hit me. Of course drug addicts use mobile phones too, until they become so desperate they sell it for drug money. Immigrants from South America enjoy the cheap mobile phones here and use them eagerly, not to mention Asians who also are addicted to them back home. People from the Middle East, with their strange and sometimes revolting cultural traditions, still like to stay in touch. Africans, when they can afford to, are just like Norwegians in this regard. They are after all the same species. Only I am different.

Right then, right there, I felt like a Neanderthal accidentally shunted into a parallel world, wandering among a different species of hominid. So similar, and yet ... different on a fundamental level.

***

I actually have a mobile phone. I have had it for years, and even pay a small monthly fee. I don't think I have used it the last year, but the last few years before I have used it approximately 5 minutes a year. This has been when I visited my best friend, and not all of that time I was the actual user. Perhaps less than half the time even. Now that I don't visit her (or anyone) anymore, I just keep it in case of emergency. Although I cannot easily think of any emergency in which only I have a mobile phone and there is no fixed-line phone nearby. Not to mention that in case of a real emergency, I would likely discover that the battery had discharged during the months since last I checked. Certainly this is what I see when I check it now, a couple times a year.

And what do they talk about? Sometimes one will sit right behind me on the commuter bus, and the phone will ring and she will say: "I'm on the bus right now." "Uh uh." "I will be there at (hh:mm)". Sometimes they talk about other things, but since I can only hear half of the conversation and don't really try to do even that, I don't understand even that half.

But as for me, I don't know what I would have said, even had I someone to say it to. Some days it can be hard enough to think of a journal entry. And there are more than 6 billion people in the world, several hundred million of which have Internet access. Even so the Chaos Node has only a couple hundred hits a day, some of which are from indexing robots and a surprising numbers are from picture search facilities (which I frankly can't believe can possibly work). Even among my actual readers, not a few will skip many of the entries. If I cannot even write interestingly, with all day to think about it, how could I possibly say something worth listening to, for a few people, over and over again, on a moment's notice?

No, the talkative life is alien to me now. The few friends I have had over the last decade or so are mostly those who find themselves and their own life endlessly interesting. I tend to share that interest.

And yet, here I am, talking about things people don't usually talk about. Am I an autist or an attention whore? You'll certainly have your own opinion on that ... if you even bother to read this. Me, I'm moving on to some other interest. But a strange moment it was, for sure, alone in the crowded street, and well worth remembering.