Do you ever wish you could tune in to people's thoughts? Not with the intent of 'reading their minds,' per se, but just to see why that girl sitting alone has that slight smirk on her face, or whether or not that guy with the stony face even has thoughts. The difference is that you wouldn't be searching for something, only satisfying your curiosity.
If you somehow found the signal of my thought waves, Van Morrison's 'I'm In Heaven (When You Smile)' would be on repeat. In case you were wondering.
Along the same lines as music in people's heads, do you ever watch the way people walk when they're listening to their iPods? I always watch the deliberateness of a person's pace and try to imagine what kind of beat they're trying to match. This kid just walked by the circulation desk--his strides were slow and calculated and exactly the same length. Totally matching a beat.
There's this passage in 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' where Oskar, the little boy who narrates most of the story, is talking about the possibility of swallowing little microphones that would play the sound of our beating hearts . . .
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone’s heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone’s hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don’t really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn’t have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon would sound like war.
Oh, Oskar, I wish you were my little brother.
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