The World of Stuff .com

Getting to know you

On my night out with my friend Evan last weekend, we talked about a lot of things. One topic was dating.

Wait, don’t go yet! Listen.

I know I haven’t had much luck with dating. Yes, I’ve complained about it a lot, more times than I’d care to link to here. And I realize that there’s nothing wrong with me per se, that I just don’t know quite how to go about it. I’m learning. I’m OK.

Picture the scene, if you will: we’re in Evan’s SUV, cruising down rural US 301 on a Saturday night at 1:00 in the morning. We’re full from eating appetizers at a restaurant in Jacksonville, and we’re listening to tunes on the radio. Evan tells me that I should take female friends on casual dates. It’s something I’ve heard before, and I tell him I don’t see the point. He says that if nothing else, it would be fun, just like what we’ve done tonight has been fun.

Fun. It was like an epic slap in the face. It was like a light shining into my head.

We were having fun, weren’t we? Of course we were. Hanging out with your friends is fun. Hanging out with friends of your preferred sex(es)/gender(s) might or might not lead to romance, but it’s always fun because they’re your friends. I guess I like to try things, right? (Right.) Why don’t I try spending time with people I don’t usually spend time alone with? I’d get to know them better, have a good time, and maybe get to know myself a little better too. Evan encouraged me to give it a shot.

The next day, I was sitting at my desk. Annoyed by the loud music coming from somewhere, I went out behind the building. There’s a small creek with a wooden bridge going over it. I stopped at the bridge for a few minutes to watch the water trickle along and to reflect on things. On the other side of the bridge is a parking garage. I crossed over to the parking garage and climbed the stairs until I was on the top story, which I had never been to before. I walked around a bit. It was in the open air, so I could see all the landmarks on campus. I walked around the perimeter until I reached a corner. It was windy, so I sat along the wall. I dialed.

I walked back to the stairs, down each flight, and back across the bridge. I returned to my room. All the while, I could practically feel Joseph Campbell lurking over my shoulder. I had followed my bliss.

She wasn’t feeling so great and didn’t end up feeling any better, so we didn’t see each other, but the point was that I did it and I could do it again. In fact, I did it the next day. She already had plans for the weekend, but the point remains valid. Who doesn’t like spending time with friends, anyway? That’s why they’re friends.

Incidentally, at least one of the aforementioned girls will probably read this. I hope that, having done so, they’d understand where I’m coming from here. I’m not trying to be a jerk or a player or anything I’m not. I’m trying to have fun and get to know people better. I want to hang out with them because I like them. It’s a compliment.

And speaking of girls and all this sort of stuff, I’ve just met someone who is interesting and nice and cool and who actually probably feels the way I do, which is pretty awesome. But I’ll save that for another post.

I love the Internet because it makes all kinds of crazy data mining possible. Virgil Griffith and a friend scoured Facebook to find the favorite books and music of 1,352 college and university networks. They also found the average standardized test scores of incoming students to those schools. The result: graphs of test scores vs. favorite books and musical acts. To put it more bluntly, it’s Musicthatmakesyoudumb and Booksthatmakeyoudumb. (Incidentally, my local community college was ranked 1,344 by test scores. My university fared much better, coming in at number 126.)

In English, we say “It’s Greek to me” if we don’t understand something. Speakers of many other languages refer to nonsense as Chinese, and there are other interesting trends as well. I can vouch that Esperanto speakers call nonsense Volapük, but I wonder why no one says “It’s English to me.” I bet English sounds really funky to someone who doesn’t speak it. (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a time-lapse video taken from the window of an airplane at night. Pretty surreal, indeed. (Via The Presurfer)