On the way to school today
Feb. 19th, 2005 01:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranThe man sitting in front of me on the 240 had (a thoughtful demeanor and a bald spot and) an instructional pamphlet for voters in the upcoming provincial election; when I next looked ahead, he had replaced it with a farsi newspaper. I thought about bilingualism, and what it must be like to be able to just switch between systems of meaning that way. I wondered if he found one easier to read.
Later, the Main bus paused for a while next to where a young man was leaning up against a wall, in a very "disaffected youth" pose, sort of British punk rock, and archetypical enough that I wondered if he'd cultivated it. Standing close in front of him was a girl with red ponytails, and after I'd watched them talk for a little bit, there was an interplay: she reached out and gave him a gentle punch to the chest, clearly just an excuse to establish contact; and he brought his own hand up to rest on her upper arm; and she leaned slowly but inexorably forward to rest her head on his chest for a moment - just a moment, perhaps two seconds, before she came back up again, because it had awkwardly dislocated her baseball cap.
The Main bus stopped again later, this time at a stoplight, and a japanese girl on the street corner smiled hugely and waved apparently right at me. After a long moment, I smiled hesitantly back, although I can only assume that she was actually looking at someone else, seated nearby; she had an air of assumed familiarity, and I'd never seen her before. On the pole next to her was a flyer for a show featuring "the Hounds of Buskerville", and, from Nanaimo, "the Kiltlifters".
My Asian Mythology teacher told us a story about the turtles who live in the pond outside Langara, but all I ever see is ducks.
Later, the Main bus paused for a while next to where a young man was leaning up against a wall, in a very "disaffected youth" pose, sort of British punk rock, and archetypical enough that I wondered if he'd cultivated it. Standing close in front of him was a girl with red ponytails, and after I'd watched them talk for a little bit, there was an interplay: she reached out and gave him a gentle punch to the chest, clearly just an excuse to establish contact; and he brought his own hand up to rest on her upper arm; and she leaned slowly but inexorably forward to rest her head on his chest for a moment - just a moment, perhaps two seconds, before she came back up again, because it had awkwardly dislocated her baseball cap.
The Main bus stopped again later, this time at a stoplight, and a japanese girl on the street corner smiled hugely and waved apparently right at me. After a long moment, I smiled hesitantly back, although I can only assume that she was actually looking at someone else, seated nearby; she had an air of assumed familiarity, and I'd never seen her before. On the pole next to her was a flyer for a show featuring "the Hounds of Buskerville", and, from Nanaimo, "the Kiltlifters".
My Asian Mythology teacher told us a story about the turtles who live in the pond outside Langara, but all I ever see is ducks.
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Date: 2005-02-20 10:23 pm (UTC)