The Curious Trait of Strangers

I had to take care of some business today. I went to the first college I attended and every brick and stone seemed to suck my soul from me. It was a place where I felt the coldness and emptiness all around me. That is, until I started talking to secretaries and professors. I asked them where to go for the various papers I needed, and what to do when I got them; then I started telling them about myself and asking about their lives. Why is it we are so free with strangers? We tell people much different things when we never expect to see them again. We tell a story, a problem, a memory; and I do believe we think they will carry it away with them and we shall never see it again.

Why is it we are not so honest around our own loved ones, I asked myself? Why do humans so easily become friendly? Indeed we put trust in these people. We encourage them, sometimes more than our closest loved ones. As I listened to one professor tell me that life would be okay and I would figure things out, he paused for a second and said, "Maybe I should be more encouraging to my son." We need quick friends and strangers in our lives. Our corporate world tells us to let no one close, but to address all customers as if they were the best of friends. We know this to be incorrect from Aristotle, who talks about the basic friendships. The friendships of utility he called them. These are the relationships of people that just allow us to get by in life.

Indeed we love strangers so much simply because they are blank canvases with which our imaginations can paint their souls. Most of us have thought of some striking beauty who crossed our paths, and imagined life with that person. We made up an history and story of how we met. Perhaps we have seen a famous leader and imagined how he or she acts around friends and loved ones. The rubber hits the road when we must wake ourselves from who we wish that person to be and accept that person as who he or she is. The beauty may not find Blur to be a good band. The politician may not agree on our favorite pet issue. We grow as people when we love these people in spite of who we wish they would be.

And I guess that is true with all our relationships. Our parents, children, siblings, spouses, best friends, and co-workers are not perfect. They don't all like Blur and they don't all agree with us on the pressing issues of politics, but somewhere in that soul, they are made in the image of God. It takes real humility to submit our opinions to this reality. Maybe every time we imagine someone as we would want them to be, we seem to tell God that he made a mistake and would be better off following our blueprint.

Still, there is a joy in the reckless abandon of projecting histories and stories to go along with a fellow human being and so long as it doesn't hurt the real person, there isn't much harm. So it seems that our relations should be somewhere in between our imagination of the best for a person and our acceptance of God's gift of free will. Where one begins and another ends I don't know, but it is nice to have a break from the realities of life with a group of strangers.

A brief introduction.

Hello out there in the internet. One of the greatest things about this here internet is that it gives people with absolutely no clue as to what they are saying the ability to talk about subjects that are completely outside their understanding. This is only slightly better than basic media in so far as we are able to speak our minds without fear of the advertisers getting squeamish.

I suppose I should tell you a little bit about myself. I am a twenty-six year old Lutheran living just south of Central Ohio. I work a minimum wage job, eat minimum wage food, and by in large dream dreams of someday living beyond my means like all the other red-blooded Americans. As it stands, I am applying for all sorts of schools and trying to read all sorts of books. (I am also a Libra, but that doesn't factor into things much because I don't believe in astrology, and given my minimum-wage life, it doesn't believe in me too much either. Ergo, astrology is right out.)

Oh, right, you are probably wondering if I have a theme for my blog. Well, like a bad movie, there is no MacGuffin. Whatever pops into my brain, for better or worse, ends up on the page. You may have just started getting used to me writing about politics and then "BLAMO!" a blog post about religion. It is hard to tell, I just do and write what my brain tells me.

Oh, and if you want back issues of my blog posts, check out my MySpace page (the address is: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=83556583). It is quite long, so I suggest using the old cut & paste method.

Well, that is enough of an introduction. You'll get used to me in a little while. Or else the site will remain dormant, but there are plenty of unloved sites out there. (Perhaps we ought to have an adopt a site for a day program where everyone goes onto a site and drives up the numbers for one day. Then, we can dash the sites' creators' hopes against the rocky shoals of reality when their numbers disappear after a day.)