Sometimes when I’m walking for ten minutes from class to class, I like to follow people. I walk behind them and synchronize my steps in time to theirs so that I’m walking just as far and just as fast as they are. It might look a bit weird, but I’m always hoping that no one really notices.

You know that saying “walk a mile in my shoes?” Yeah, that’s the idea. How much can you tell about someone from the way they walk? I don’t know, that’s why I do it. Quick, short steps, numerous quick little pauses = a frosh that’s late for a class that he doesn’t know the location of? Slow, purposeful strides = dude knows where he’s going, but doesn’t really mind when he gets there…maybe one of my TA’s that’s always five minutes late?

You do it enough and you start thinking up stories for these people. Maybe this guy’s slowly half-skipping his way to meet up with his girl for coffee, where he’ll dump her because he’s realized he prefers the company of men (who wouldn’t?). Maybe this guy’s travelling to an inter-gang breakdance battle, and he’s conserving his energy and protecting his dancing-machines until he gets there. Maybe this girl stepped in some gum and that weird gimp in her right leg is because she’s trying to rub it off on the ground because she can still feel a little bit of stickiness in her step even though she already spent like a whole minute trying to scrape it off on the stairs when she first realized she stepped in gum and now she’s late for lunch with her friends and she doesn’t want them to know she stepped in gum and laugh at her and call her the gum-stepping-loser-queen. Who knows!?! Only they do.

But maybe if I walk behind them long enough and walk the walk well enough, eventually I can figure some of it out. Like if I ever get to the point where I’ve gathered so much experience that I can break down someone’s walking style just by looking at them. Like how baseball hitting or pitching coaches can look and criticize a player’s swing or pitch mechanics. Like if I can break down a walk into a dozen different little mini-movement or katas, like when the Taskmaster was training USAgent how to throw a shield like the real Captain America and he realized that there were like a thousand tiny little nuances that he had to master first. Or if I can equate subtle body movements to emotions like…looks down at the floor while walking = social introvert, hands in pockets = suspicious, calculating something, high heel ankle = sexual frustration…I don’t know, whatever. That’s some Batgirl body reading ability right there.

Wouldn’t it be the coolest thing to just be able to look at nothing else but the accelerograph of someone’s walk and say like “Yep, this 5’4″, 113.5-113.8 pound girl of Eastern European descent is clearly sexual frustrated, according to this pressure spike of the left heel at the 1.05 second mark and the consequent relatively light impression of the right tertiary toe at 1.34 seconds.”? I could just open up a psychiatric office with a pressure sensitive welcome mat, and patients would be in-and-out in like thirty seconds flat.

This weekend while we were walking around Pacific Mall, out of nowhere, my mom just says to me that I have a defective walk. Not exactly her words (since she barely knows any English) but that’s the impression I got from it. She says that I walk too much on the outsides of my feet, and that I walk like a tightrope walker. …what the hell is that!?! I have a defective walk!?! Choking Yak – the anchor of the William Berczy Grade 8 100-Meter relay team (that only finished second in the 100-Meter sprint because Emu had an inhuman starting gate jump in the final heat) and the undisputed champion runner of Mr. Foote’s Richmond Hill High School Grade 9 physical education class – that Choking Yak walks DEFECTIVELY? That’s like saying Larry Bird’s left hand is gimp, or that Martin Luther King had a lisp. I’m going to go get fitted for a custom walking shoe someday, like at one of those crazy places where they video tape your feet as you run on a treadmill. And then I’ll see for sure whether or not my steps really are wacked out. Crazy mom, what does she know?

That would change everything though. A relevation like that shakes the very fundamental core of your being. I mean, isn’t walking like the easiest thing to do in the world, next to breathing (provided that you still have a non-paralyzed, working body, of course)? So if I had asthma as a child, and I have a defective walk, doesn’t that mean I’ve screwed up the two easiest things you can do in life? How could you live with that? You would be a complete utter failure as a human being. Suicide wouldn’t even be good enough, since you couldn’t even properly walk to the fucking bridge you want to jump off of.

Walking is fucking crazy. Did you know that? Holy SHIT.

If you had a friend who was a tightrope walker, and you were walking down a sidewalk, and he fell, that would be completely unacceptable.