In episode five of Serial Experiments Lain, a girl and several other people are handed packets of tissues by a boy on the street. When she opens it and takes the first one out, there is a message written on it. I love stuff like that - anonymous communication between strangers.

We live a very crowded world with relatively few personal connections. It’s a paradox that’s referred to all the time: the more people surround us, the lonelier we feel. In the small towns that used to be common, you might know the face of everyone in a three-mile radius. But if you live in a city, you’re lucky to know the name of everyone on your hall in your apartment building. We walk around, surrounded by people we try not to look at. I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else. I don’t smile at strangers. But I should.

I think that’s why situations like the one referred to above really make me happy. They make it seem like someone in that vast sea of people is trying to make a connection. I love seeing signs that aren’t advertisements or gang signs, just people trying to make your day better. I was in Chinatown a few months ago and saw a piece of paper on a lampost that said “She loves you” at the top and “yeah, yeah, yeah” at the bottom. It was great.

One of the coolest things I’ve heard about in a while is Bren Bataclan’s Smile Boston Project. Bren does paintings like these and attaches notes like this one. Most excellent. Boston could use more smiles.

This week’s Boston Globe Magazine has a short piece written by a woman, Norah Burch, who was fired because of what her employer read on her blog. She was an “administrative assistant” at Harvard’s social science department until her boss followed a link in her email sig to her personal website and from there to her blog.* She used it to vent about her job, writing things like “I’m two nasty emails from professors away from bombing the entire Harvard campus” and “I was seriously livid today. I was ready to get a shotgun and declare open season on all faculty members and students who dared cross me.” Her posts were labeled as “extreme misconduct,” and she was fired. Of course, the issue is that instead of just complaining, the woman in question threatened violence. And in our paranoid society, we don’t allow that.

True, there have been many occasions in which irritated employees have pulled guns. There have been bombings. Still, it seems like people overreact- but that’s beside the point.

So the moral of the story, boys and girls, is that you don’t put links to your personal sites in your work email. And it might be a good idea to do your venting on paper- and then burn it. Public blogs, believe it or not, are just that- PUBLIC. I can be reasonably sure that my boss doesn’t read either of my blogs because the man is all but computer illiterate and has no way of finding out the URL. I don’t indirectly email it to him every day.

*The blog was hosted on Blogging.com, a small site I had never heard of. It’s one of the first personal blogging sites I’ve ever seen that is neither a manifestation of LiveJournal nor Blogger.

One thing that gives me continual amusement is looking at human behavior and seeing how it used to help us survive. Lots of things, mostly related to reproduction and the differences between men and women, can be traced back to the beginning of the species. Why do guys like big breasts? Because they’re a sign of fertility, and that used to be a much bigger concern than it is now. Why do men seem so reluctant to commit, compared to women? Because their basic instinct tells them to spread their seed around as much as they can, creating as many children as possible. A woman’s basic instinct tells her to get a strong, stable man to stick around and provide for her while she has children so that they have a better chance of surviving.
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Very strong opinion makes me uncomfortable. I’m an atheist, but I don’t like when people rail against religion and dismiss people with any sort of religious belief as stupid and ignorant. I don’t like Bush, but I hate when people dehumanize him and refuse to believe he could ever do anything good. I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t like militant vegetarians or vegans who try to make people feel bad for eating meat.

I think it’s because I don’t like absolute, unshakeable belief. I think that absolute faith in the truth of every word of the Bible and belief that everyone who doesn’t feel the same is going to Hell is on par with the belief that religion can never do any good, no matter what. The people I really respect are the rational ones who don’t get carried away by their ideas either way- people who are willing to accept that the other side can be okay, sometimes.

Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. The guy knew what he was talking about. I think that to be a wise, thoughtful, intelligent person, you have to be constantly examining who you are and what you think. You can’t just take a single conviction all the way and never consider that it may be flawed. It often leads to dehumanizing your “opponent,” and that’s one of the worst things you can do.

It sounds like something they tell you in kindergarten. “Everyone has feelings!” But it’s true. People don’t seem to really think about it very often. I forget it all the time. I think that if there is a root to everything bad going on in the world (I won’t say “evil,” because I don’t believe in it), this is it. Oh, it’s fine to torture them, they’re not really people- they’re fags, or Jews, or criminals, or terrorists. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, no matter what they’ve done. I was visiting a court as part of a program last summer, and I ended up sitting next to a man who turned out to be a sex offender of some sort. Afterwards, everyone talked about how freaky and disgusting it was that I had actually been sitting next to him. They had forgotten that he was just a guy. A guy who had done some messed up things, yes, but still a person. His body was just the same as anyone else’s body, why should it be strange to sit next to it?

It’s definitley something I need to work on. I tend to take on an Us vs. Them attitude pretty easily, and I’m most comfortable having a few close friends and ignoring everyone else. I need to work on talking to more people. It’s not a good way to be.

I will readily admit to judging people I meet online by the way they communicate. If I meet someone online and they say “omg, so many ppl r cuming 2 my prty 2nite lol!!!111 wat do u want 2 bring??? lmao,” I will try to steer clear of them, as the netspeak irritates me beyond belief. It makes me physically cringe when it’s really bad. It’s different if it’s someone I know in real life, because I talk to them away from a computer. I have things besides words on a screen on which to base my opinion of them.

Why do people do it? Do they think it’s cool? I have no idea. When I see netspeak I get the impression of a twelve-year-old girl with nothing intelligent to say, ever. I don’t understand why people would give that impression to others. I’m not so much knocking the people who use it with their friends as the people who post long intros to communities in it, and then get defensive when members ask them to please stop, as it hurts their eyes. I guess everyone has a right to talk however they want, but I don’t know why they’d want to express their right like that.

What makes it worse is that phrases like lol are so overused that they’ve lost their meaning. I used to say lol from time to time, but it became so ubiquitous that I got fed up and stopped. People use it after things that are barely amusing. For instance, “did I leave my CDs at your house? lol” I hate it.

To any netspeak users out there- I’m honestly interested in why you choose to type like that. Argue with me.

I was going to make a well-written, coherent post about how much militant atheists bother me, but I can’t do it. The words won’t organize themselves into any sort of real order. (This does not bode well for the English essay I have to write tonight.) So I’ll strip it down to the basic ideas and you’ll get the picture.

A while ago, I was very slightly involved in the online atheist community. I left because so much of it seemed to be no more than “Wow, don’t Christians suck? Here’s an IM conversation in which I make a fool out of a random Christian online,” and “We’re so smart. All those theist sheep are idiots.” One girl’s request for advice on how to reconcile her lack of belief with the Christianity of her boyfriend was met with wonderment because she was dating a Christian at all. “There are plenty of great atheist guys out there! Why not date one of them?” It bothered me. I know plenty of intelligent and religious people that I would never think of disparaging for their beliefs. So many atheists seem to think that atheism and intelligence always exist together, one never without the other. It was all so… harsh.

I feel the same way about militant vegans/vegetarians. It’s great that you’re doing it, but some people don’t want to. That’s their problem.

I guess it just boils down to the fact that everyone should do what they want. If it’s not hurting you personally, get over it and let them do their thing.

I was at CVS this morning, and the two girls in front of me in line, who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, were buying mud masks. What is it about our society that tells little girls to buy mud masks? The same thing that tells women to get Botox injections and that guy on TV to get butt implants. It’s disgusting.

I’m afraid that by the time I’m middle aged, plastic surgery and the like will be standard for aging women. Oops, there’s a wrinkle, time to sign up for your first face lift!

Yes, it’s the media, blah blah unrealistic body types blah blah blah. I just wish people were smarter than that. Why can’t we look at all the “beautiful” people and dismiss them as slightly sick anomalies? Why are 75% of teenage girls unwilling to reveal their weight? Why can’t people be intelligent enough to look around and see that they don’t have to be blonde with a BMI of 18 to be happy and loved?