Meeting people

I love people. I love listening to people tell me their stories, I love talking to people...maybe less so sharing mine but it's all the same. Doesn't matter if it's a streetwalker in Brisbane who seemed to have s0omething going on in her eyes that caught my attention or the guy sitting next to me at my wine bar where there are NO strangers, I just have to know. This being said, I'm sort of reserved. I feel like most of the people who are people persons like me have less of a consideration to what other people are thinking or how they are coming across...or more likely that they just care less. Whichever way it is, the fact remains that I am often stymied into silence or smiling and nodding because I am afraid to seem as foolish as I think I will come off as.

Now most of you are saying, is this our Rhiannon? Our Rhiannon who does pretty much what she believes and thinks all the time and marches to not her own drummer but her own jazz combo? Yes, yes it is. Usually if you will notice in conversation with me (Tammy, Dad, and Stu you don't count so just hush) I don't share too much personal data. I've been working on changing that over the last several years as that ONE big life-changing event brought to my attention that this unfortunately has the side-effect of concealing things which should be publicly aired and mended. Anyway, back to the point.

So for my occupation, I very specifically am in a position where I speak with new people all the time and I like doing that. I like the small social interactions and the surface discussions, it's just those that require something more soulful to be bared that I shy from . What I think is that these soul-interactions and their relative frequency is actually coming to fore more because of the internet and the changing, immediate ways in which we are now communicating. Doesn't make sense? Think of it this way. When you snail mail wrote your lover who was gone to war, did you want to waste his time on the vaguaries of your existence, and waste his mental space on the whimsy of your mood? Probably not. You thought things out a little bit more, because you wouldn't be able to just take back what you said or change it for clarification two seconds later. When calling long-distance was costly, did you move a zillion miles away from those you love, and then have a spat over nothing via an instant messenger that was really all built on a misunderstanding due to the impersonal nature of IMing? Or one of my personal favorites, did you decide you knew your soul friend without ever meeting them or actually speaking with them and all your communications were digital?

Hardly. These communicative tools (that's what they are, people, just remember that) were created and have helped us get things done and simultaneously procrastinate, and keep and make our relationships stronger. But what they've also done is allow many people like me who get apprehensive when on too personal footing have a little crutch that they can use to keep from having to give up too much information and too much of their little souls. So all around us, especially those in technical fields, people have these strange relationships that are absolutely something new. E-friends are a classification in and of themselves, akin to pen pals but often much more deeply rooted and definitely more frequent in contact, but often lacking that basal mutual trust as the shared experiences just aren't there. I have some e-friends I've literally been talking to over a decade whom I've never met and don't know if I intend to. They know a lot about the details of me, but without those base shared experiences and the trial of just face-to-face communication I wouldn't say that they know my soul.

Now, those things being said I'll expound upon the virtues and usefulness of e-friends and electronic communications and tools for communication and relationships. But just right now I am feeling lonely, with my soulpieces far away, and let me think on this.