2025, Saturday, June 21st.
At seven in the morning, a woman in a green top and black knee-length wide-legged pants walks around the city with her camera as various messages crash into her eyes:
750 M² office for rent!
Paper, Pizza, Party - all in the trash!
Buy and Sell Gold!
Innovative!
Film and Media Center!
Stores for rent!
We're open!
A flock of pigeons gathered under a tree, the woman raised her camera, the pigeons thought she had raised a gun and scattered. They landed in some nearby trees.
The neighbor's fat black-and-white cat is out for a walk, too, and the woman raises her camera; the cat glares at her and walks calmly toward the far lawn. The woman sits down on one of the benches and looks at the cat, who looks back at her, starting to get a little impatient, with a reproachful look in her eyes: I take my walks, you take yours! Now what do you want with this?
The young man on his morning jog, the unrealistically perfect lines of muscle showing under his t-shirt reminds the woman of the podcast she was listening to last night: a PhD in philosophy with a sculpted body and a very unique perspective on a lot of things talking about how she's maintained her sculpted body for a long time, and the reason why she's staying away from the gym in the US: there's too many people there who use steroids to get perfectly muscled quickly. So much so that it has become a popular game at the gym to guess which person's body was built over years and years and which one was quickly gained by using steroids.
The young woman jogging in the morning smiles at the woman with the camera, and she smiles back at her. As they passed each other, the woman with the camera hesitated to say good morning; the young woman thinking, "There are tourists who get up so early on Saturdays."
Then the woman inadvertently walks into a basketball court: it turns out that the court is not surrounded on all sides by barbed wire, and she has passed by the street side of the court countless times, never realising that the other side of the court is connected to a children's playground. Suddenly she was in this empty basketball court and began to imagine that she could come here early in the morning and shoot hoops for fun without having to compete with any of the kids for space - Wait! But what if the sound of the ball being shot disturbed the people who lived in the neighbourhood? What if she brought the ball and there was already someone else here, would she play with them? Or would she just walk away embarrassed? - These few what-ifs quickly put her off the idea of coming here to play basketball.
Just as she raised her camera to the rim, she noticed an old woman in white shirt behind a bush outside the court stop and look at her! The woman with the camera was suddenly alert - strangers were supposed to brush past each other or keep at least five meters apart moving in one direction; if they got too close, one of them was supposed to speed up and pass the other; or one of them was supposed to stop and pretend to have something to think about or to look at the map and let the other one pass. A stranger should not stand still to look at another stranger! - But the old woman suddenly said at this point to the bush, "Well? Let's go then!" Turns out she was walking her dog ...... The woman with the camera was relieved. When they met around the corner, the little dog barked in fear. "Don't be afraid!" The woman smiled at it and said, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" The old woman laughed and dragged the dog away.
She encounters another fat grey cat from her neighbor's house - the cat that doesn't go out much and whose steps are a little hesitant, whose eyes look at the woman a little evasive, and the woman, not wanting to disturb its rare activity, hastily averts her eyes and gets out of its sight in the lightest and fastest way possible - One socially awkward and another socially awkward should have this tacit understanding with each other.
