Ugh.  I hate pretense.  I had written a couple other posts on here…an introduction, an attempt at something meaningful…but they weren’t me, honestly.  If you want to know me…well, I was gonna say you could keep reading this blog for a while, but no matter how long you read, you won’t really know me.

I think that’s a mistake a lot of people make – thinking that somehow reading words that have been pondered over, deleted and rewritten who knows how many times, left as unfinished thoughts until a convenient moment, polished and fashioned to paint the perfect picture…that those words will be the means to forming a true connection, to really knowing someone.  They won’t.  Or at least, they never have for me.

They have helped me maintain a connection with someone already truly known – someone who has heard me fumble for words, or have something come out the wrong way, or seen me turn beet red from embarrassment over something silly, and they have helped me learn a whole lot about countless other people.

But it’s weird and unnatural to find out information about your neighbor by checking their status updates and blogs, when you see them a couple times a week and neither of you can seem to manage more than a 10 second conversation.  It just makes me think that I shouldn’t know everything I know about them, and they shouldn’t know things about me either.  I can’t help but feel like knowledge of someone should be earned, not brazenly displayed as a cure to someone’s boredom in the middle of the day.

I’ve just realized lately that I don’t actually know anybody I see on a regular basis.  And they don’t know me.  At all.  We know a lot about each other, but that makes conversation even more difficult.  If you already know everything I did this week, how can we even start a conversation?  It’s frustrating, and isolating, and deceptive, and sometimes hurtful.

All that to say, you won’t really get to know me from what I write on here, but maybe you’ll identify with me occasionally, or get a new perspective on something, or maybe just find a momentary solution to your boredom some afternoon.  After all, there’s only so much you can expect to get out of some words on a screen.