Sorting People
Today I'm thinking about how people end up in proximity to other people.
Work sorts folks according to aptitude, interest, class and luck. You end up with folks of somewhat similar backgrounds, most of the time, and a shared set of conditioning -- whether that's certain sets of university training, family tendencies, whatever. This isn't to say that people who work together are the same, but there tends to be similarity.
The internet sorts people according to interests: polyamory, Star Wars, women's football, local food.
School sorts people by age, pretty much.
In cities folks are often heavily sorted. At least in Vancouver, the way people deal with having so many people everywhere all the time is to ignore large portions of them, to exclude them from the probable-friends realm. Then we build other structures to make probable friends in a more orderly, sorted way: online dating websites, cooking classes, walking groups, photography clubs. And again we end up sorted by interest or hobbies.
So it was my expectation that, in a small town, there would be a lot less sorting and you'd need to get to know people who weren't in the kinds of categories that work and school and interest-groups sorted you into. With fewer people, you'd end up knowing more people by physical proximity.
It hadn't occurred to me that physical proximity often came about because of certain sets of interests, aptitudes... and personality traits.
So here I am in a small town, and I've met an upper class Mexican woman who's ultra social and friendly, and I connect with her really well despite the fact that we share few interests or age categories or whatever. I wouldn't have met her back home. One of her skills seems to be the ability to connect well to almost everyone, which I find pretty great. I'm curious about how she would make friends in the city, just because she knows *everyone* here (and also apparently everyone who has ever lived here).
And I've also met an eighty-something woman (who I will be living with) who is from one of the founding families of the town, who brews and quilts and gardens and sands and paints her deck and kayaks and just separated from her husband of many years because she felt he was getting too dependent on her. She has a greenhouse with tomatoes and cucumbers. She has apple trees and a raspberry patch. She is, honestly, like a little window into the life I always hope/expected to have at that age.
So that's two strong awesome women I've met in the first week. I do not have to struggle or work hard to make friends. I do not have to force myself to meet people where they're at in order to broaden my mind, nor do I have to limit myself to make people comfortable (although the poly cat isn't out of the bag yet).
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I had a similar experience when I went to volunteer at the botanical garden looking for a redheaded gardener boy to date and received a bunch of amazing surrogate grandmothers instead. I guess I'm surprised to meet awesome women outside my age bracket. I guess I'm surprised awesome, fully realized humans exist where I had previously set a tidy stereotype box.
I guess I enjoy people, and respond well to people, in ways outside the sorting boxes I'm used to using to find friends.
Oh, and I guess I like people again? It's been months, at mimimum, since I could say anything like that.
This summer is a good choice for me.
Work sorts folks according to aptitude, interest, class and luck. You end up with folks of somewhat similar backgrounds, most of the time, and a shared set of conditioning -- whether that's certain sets of university training, family tendencies, whatever. This isn't to say that people who work together are the same, but there tends to be similarity.
The internet sorts people according to interests: polyamory, Star Wars, women's football, local food.
School sorts people by age, pretty much.
In cities folks are often heavily sorted. At least in Vancouver, the way people deal with having so many people everywhere all the time is to ignore large portions of them, to exclude them from the probable-friends realm. Then we build other structures to make probable friends in a more orderly, sorted way: online dating websites, cooking classes, walking groups, photography clubs. And again we end up sorted by interest or hobbies.
So it was my expectation that, in a small town, there would be a lot less sorting and you'd need to get to know people who weren't in the kinds of categories that work and school and interest-groups sorted you into. With fewer people, you'd end up knowing more people by physical proximity.
It hadn't occurred to me that physical proximity often came about because of certain sets of interests, aptitudes... and personality traits.
So here I am in a small town, and I've met an upper class Mexican woman who's ultra social and friendly, and I connect with her really well despite the fact that we share few interests or age categories or whatever. I wouldn't have met her back home. One of her skills seems to be the ability to connect well to almost everyone, which I find pretty great. I'm curious about how she would make friends in the city, just because she knows *everyone* here (and also apparently everyone who has ever lived here).
And I've also met an eighty-something woman (who I will be living with) who is from one of the founding families of the town, who brews and quilts and gardens and sands and paints her deck and kayaks and just separated from her husband of many years because she felt he was getting too dependent on her. She has a greenhouse with tomatoes and cucumbers. She has apple trees and a raspberry patch. She is, honestly, like a little window into the life I always hope/expected to have at that age.
So that's two strong awesome women I've met in the first week. I do not have to struggle or work hard to make friends. I do not have to force myself to meet people where they're at in order to broaden my mind, nor do I have to limit myself to make people comfortable (although the poly cat isn't out of the bag yet).
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I had a similar experience when I went to volunteer at the botanical garden looking for a redheaded gardener boy to date and received a bunch of amazing surrogate grandmothers instead. I guess I'm surprised to meet awesome women outside my age bracket. I guess I'm surprised awesome, fully realized humans exist where I had previously set a tidy stereotype box.
I guess I enjoy people, and respond well to people, in ways outside the sorting boxes I'm used to using to find friends.
Oh, and I guess I like people again? It's been months, at mimimum, since I could say anything like that.
This summer is a good choice for me.