floating

2006/05/24

Stranger

We pass strangers on the street all the time, how wonderful it would be to get to know them how scary would it be to find out that every fifth beats somebody up or is beaten, that every fourth was sexually harassed or was the harasser, that every third gets drunk and aggressive on daily bases and every second is preoccupied with something better than to talk to you – and this is the reason why we don’t just come up to strangers – you are always afraid that they are some maniacs or that they will think of you as a maniac for stepping up to them. But we must have some friend and we must have met them somehow and this is called taking chances and distinguishing weed from the seed.
You would think of that person as a friend always, for as long as you live, even if that person moves away, even if the person dies before you do, even if the person would turn out to be a computer program which (or even who) has always been there for you and it had a name, a place to live, human shape, thoughts of it’s own (man were they deep) – you never know. You know it feels real right now and even if you found out the cruelest truth someday it couldn’t make all this less real. I know I’m getting freaky here but this is how you end up if you call your cyber buddies strangers just because you couldn’t shake their hand, just because you’ll never know for certain if it is them on all those photos they’ve sent you, hell you can not even be sure if they are male or female. And you can easily become paranoid: you think of them as computer programs that are there to entertain you when you need them and leave you alone when you need some piece (don’t you wish your family could be programmed this way sometimes?).
THE FUTURE OF OUR SOCIAL INTERACTION: creating profiles of our souls and putting them on display for strangers to see them and decide if they’re interested in anything you have to offer and then add them in their shopping baskets and paying for them with parts of their souls.
Who are online strangers then?
The people you ignore when they want you to add them on your contact list, the people who turned out to be freaks or liars and the people you didn’t even notice but were there all the time. They are not the people you feel comfortable with, whom you tell the only truth about yourself, to whom you share your moods and emotions and they do the same to you.
I wouldn’t call them strangers just because they don’t come in 3D version I would have to invent a new word to call them something that would mean more than a friend and less than a soul mate. And in the end it doesn’t really matter how I call them as long as I (and they) know how it feels.

posted by calamity @ 5/24/2006 05:33:00 pm

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