Compartment 14B

Never talk to strangers? Sez you! 2004-07-26 - 10:13 a.m. Today�s entry is brought to you courtesy of inspiration from Zoot. I talk to strangers all the time. I would totally be the disembodied voice from the toilet stall butting in on your conversation. (Don�t know what I�m talking about? Follow that link above to this morning�s post.) In university I had this pair of earmuffs with puppy heads on them, complete with floppy ears and lolling tongues. The ears would fly out when I was caught in a breeze or bombing along on my bike. Sometimes I forgot I was wearing them and it was only the fixed gaze at the side of my head that reminded me. Those earmuffs were a great gauge of whether or not people around me had a sense of humour. If I was met with shocked looks of disbelief (as in my GAWD! I can�t believe you�d wear such things!), scowls, or averted eyes, you were not my kind of person. If, on the other hand, you smiled, giggled, gave a thumbs-up, or in another way expressed approval, well, you and I would get along just fine. A friend once told me that her friend at my new campus had seen me around. Puzzled, since I�d never met her friend, I asked how she�d recognized me. Turned out she�d mentioned this chyck with these wild earmuffs� Heh. The other day, I took a page from the kids that wave at strangers from cars and beamed all the way to work. I figure I got about 75% of the people I made eye contact with to smile back. Not bad for a drizzle-y day in a conservative Canadian city. I suspect (as I mentioned in Zoot�s comments section) that a lot of bloggers and journallers are the talk-to-stranger types. The same impulse that has us sharing on the net has us sharing in real life. And sure, sometimes the people we talk to don�t respond, but when you throw out a �man, these stalls are gross, I don�t want to sit down � hasn�t this bar heard of cleaning?� and you get back a �seriously, just what you want when you�re buzzed � a workout for your quads� floating back to you, that�s synergy. I�ve made more than one friend in life by striking up a conversation out of the blue and I don�t plan on stopping anytime soon. Before - After All content � Shawna 2003-2010 That means no swiping my stuff - text, images, etc. - without asking. P.S. If you're emailing me, replace the [at] with @ in the "to" line. Oh, and if you put the word "journal" in the subject line it'll have a better chance of making it past my junk mail filters. recommend me HTML and design help by Jo hosted by Diaryland