Ignoring Other People and My Moth Friend – Thoughts from May 20 and 21, 2023

May 20, 2023

I’m on day six of eight days of working the same earlier shift. It’s only two hours off the shift I enjoy better, but it’s an annoying two hours. The most annoying part about it is feeling tired every day. If I told you when I was coming to work, you would probably scoff and tell me about your 5:00 am shift you did for years. Let’s just agree to disagree about how wrong you are. I still technically get up in the AM hours. On different days, I have learned how many snoozes I can get away with. I know I’m in trouble if I’m tired on my Monday which was today. My Monday is usually on Saturday. People who work abnormal jobs understand. If you get two days off in a row, that is your weekend.

I saw a guy walking with earphones in his ears, drumming in the air, and ignoring the world around him. Some people may see this and think this guy is living a carefree life. He doesn’t care what people think of him. He lives by his own rules. What I see is yet another person going through life and ignoring everyone around him. Ignoring other people is not a skill worthy of praise. We don’t need more people who don’t care about other people. The world is full of those people. I was shy once. I get it. The world is full of unpleasant places, people, and circumstances. That doesn’t mean you should add to it by ignoring other people as if they don’t exist. They don’t go away if you ignore them. You just become part of the unpleasantness of the world.

I think a big part of people wanting to ignore the world is the rise of autism in people. Autism has almost become a personality type. I have a hard time looking strangers in the eye. I don’t deal well with auditory, visual, or touch stimulus. Someone walking in front of me with loud clothes is distracting and annoying. Having said this, I still open myself up to the world. You can’t see interesting people without mostly seeing boring people. Luckily, there are many people in the world. Every day is different. Those differences make life interesting. If you spend your time either bored or freaked out by change, you are setting yourself up for a miserable life. You can listen to a song or watch a movie, but the people who created those things found inspiration by observing and experiencing the world. I’d rather experience life from my point of view than someone else’s interpretation of it. The world never changes if you ignore it.

The thing that separates boring people from exciting people is connecting with other people. Boring people never change and don’t connect with other people. Their stories remain the same. They tell their story the same way regardless of who they’re talking to. Exciting people never tell a story the same way twice. Especially with different audiences, they cater the story to the group. Connecting to other people is the key to storytelling. Boring people tell you what happened to them. Exciting people find new insights the more people they talk to about any incident. My storytelling goes between interesting and weird. Either way, it can be entertaining if you let it be. Just don’t get caught up in details.

May 21, 2023

I was talking with a coworker, and he was asking questions based on finding out I’m an atheist. Invariably, people get frustrated by my answers. They want to know about my beliefs, and I tell them I don’t have any. If I don’t know something, I don’t form beliefs about it. It is either knowledge or the unknown. I’ve had many conversations with people about religion. I usually want to speak generally, and they want me to talk specifically about whatever they want to know. The assumptions most people carry with them about the world don’t apply to me. I spend most of my conversational life thinking about my words carefully. This alone can be frustrating for people to deal with. In the end, they either change their question or move on to something else.

I just had a moth on my windshield. It was there about ten minutes before it flew off. Where did it come from? Why did it land on my vehicle? Is it a he or she? I’ll never know, but he was my moth friend for ten minutes. I was videoing him when he flew away. As you can tell, I thought of him as a “he.” I’ve had many friendships with little creatures in my life. I think most people see little creatures as gross and annoying. The closer I look at them, the more I get to know them and the cuter they get. The most I can do is observe them. You can’t really interact with them. Their movements are the only communication you will get from them. That’s the same with most animals. They communicate with you. You just have to listen and observe.