I’m unwell and I’m bitter. I have a cold. I never have colds.
So I worked today, the best I could, then I napped (accidentally) for 2.5 hours, woke up ravenous, and just barely stumbled my lethargic self to the cafe where I knew they would feed me and ask few questions about my disheveled state.
Soon after I settled in, an acquaintance of mine also settled in, at the table next to me. I’ve known him as long as I’ve lived here, but as with many people, I haven’t really spent a lot of time with him. More of a passing “good day”, and that’s all. We started talking and it didn’t take long to figure out we both love boats.
He was telling me how he used to fly from Coronado CA to visit his friends on their yacht for the start of boating season in Friday Harbor (outside of Seattle) every year.
“Their boat is named Plumduff, ridiculous name, I know…”
“I KNOW PLUMDUFF!!!”
“You do?!?! Really?!?!”
“Siiiiiii….”
Over the next couple of hours the conversation meandered through how we all seem to know everyone else here, and also some of the more amazing things we can see in the far corners of the world. The places where we know no one at all.
Turns out we both love those places the best.
Yes, we of the west coast do tend to have a lot of interconnected contacts. That’s actually not all that new. You can’t swing a cat around here without hitting someone who’s within a couple degrees of your own social circle, however far north or south that might be.
But there are still places you can fly in the world, where the tickets are actually hand-written. (I wonder if they still offer the safety demo as you’re taking off, or if they’ve dispensed with that as an unnecessary add-on.)
There are places in the world where cannibalism is a thing, and so are full face and body tattoos. These are hugely important to social standing in their society. Can we begin to understand that? How?
There are places in the world that our minds cannot conceive of without any context. And our Western minds, we’ve really got no context… so we’re winging it, and that’s the coolest part of all.
This world is so small, and yet it’s vast beyond comprehension. We have nothing in common, and yet, we have everything in common.
We agreed that’s pretty awesome.
So cheers… to life! To new friends. To fancy yachts and face tattoos. To little understanding of anything at all, and the knowledge that there’s everything in the world right about that.
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