A Girl With a Sword

passing afternoon

Spent the afternoon sitting at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. I left the house to concentrate on my Pragmatics reading (modularity of mind theory is tying mine up in knots and I'm not sure I have the module in my mind to understand modules!), but ended up being distracted by the Columbia Saturday afternoon-ness. There was the game on in the coffee shop but I sat outside. I periodically got a score update. I also got the rundown of what's happening this weekend, the local photography scene, a local school and how one of the teachers is annoying one of the moms who might just take her son out and homeschool him (this motivation for homeschooling is one of my pet peeves, had to work hard not to insert something into that conversation). I listened to some men talking beside me who I first decided were speaking a Bantu language, then Indian, then Arabic, then maybe just an unusual Spanish dialect, but they kept switching in and out of English so it was confusing. All I know is that they had some great uvular consonants. A woman from Texas, in town for a wedding, talked to a man who recent got stationed at the local army base.

One overheard conversation that really intrigued me was a white-Rastafari guy talking to his friend about how he's recently had to buy a laptop, but he doesn't plan on using it much. I've recently become acquainted with more people in this young, computerless counterculture and it really kind of impresses me that they can live like that, no cellphones, no computers, occasionally using wikipedia or checking cnn.com at a local library. Of course it makes them damn hard to get ahold of, but even that is kind of cool. Mystique, I guess that's what it is. What they do seems like magic to me, living without the technology I need to get by. I guess it's the simple life, it's the Thoreau in my Bobo heart, telling me that life would be better if I would go to the woods.