alone and together simultaneously

Sitting in a sea of people. All taking up similar amounts of physical space. The long, sturdy wooden table divided into chocolate squares of eight beings' elbowrooms, punctuated by two lamps and endlessly expanding bubbles of private thoughts and non-thoughts. We're all existing here, together and next to one another, but also so far apart and deep away, tucked snugly in our respective worlds of gchat, blogging, and wolfram alpha (that's me in the middle of Mr.GChat and Calc-2 Girl).

We're together and alone. 

This is something I noticed a lot over my summer spent in Korea - especially in Seoul. People are so good at tuning the world out when forced to share a certain quantity of air with other beings. They exist all pressed up against each other without even seeing - without even noticing that the girl whose outer thigh area is slightly touching their outer thigh area across the continuous metro seat looks like she's about to cry. Without ever seeing the soldier-man in camo, riding the bus standing up (cause he's a man - no need for comfort of the butt or feet!) with a package next to his combat boots-ed feet, wrapped in pink-hearts-galore wrapping paper (the package, not the boots). So many small tragedies and sweetnesses of lives pressed up against yours that you never pursue to investigate or care about...!

But I mean it must be a matter of survival, too. Yeah, we're all social beings, but everybody's minds need alone time, albeit in varying degrees. In big cities where you're always hustling and bustling and jostling with other people doing the same right next to you, it's hard to have alone-in-the-zone time. When you can just stare blankly and think about blank things, which is just a fancy way of saying "nada nada limonada" (which is just another fancy way of saying "nothing") - crucial for sanity. So we zone out of the physical world around us and zoom into ourselves, our computers, our daydreams, our Things To Do lists - create our own thought-bubble-existence worlds, while everyone else does the same. Exist all together and completely alone at the same time. What a weird, weird thing.

Apparently, if you gather all the people in the world and get them to stand shoulder to shoulder and face to face, we would all fit into the city of L.A. (source: fun fact shared over Sunday lunch - MK, also known as michiecream). ...le WOAH. If this happened for real, the world would probably explode in a metaphysical way or something, due to the concentration of so many big and small and medium sized thought bubbles. Imagine all the different trains of thought that would be going through the airspace above our collective heads! Imagine all the same ones! And everyone lost in their own worlds...

...until someone across the table from you accidentally nudges your foot because she was readjusting herself and you were readjusting yourself and both of your feet met in the same space at the same moment in a tiny collision that brought you back to the real world of Clark Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, U.S.A., Earth.