As I grow older I realize that I am becoming more and more strange. Self-discovery. Not strange by other's standards, but strange by my own. I do not necessarily recognize this "Nate" I have become so "familiar" with over the past 19.5 years...With every late night I stay up thinking about what my life is like and what it has become, I realize:
I am not as simple as I thought.
Ever look in the mirror and wonder who's staring back? I do.....a lot.
Not wondering who physically is staring back as in, "A man with short, black hair, wearing a red t-shirt, etc."
But WHOM is staring back. What do other people think of the person you see? What do people like about them? What could people do without? What do people say behind their back both good and bad, honest and dishonest? What are the person in the mirror's nervous ticks and mannerisms they preform when speaking in front of a large crowd or talking with an intimate friend? What are their favorite words to use and do they even sound intelligent when they speak in general?
Now let's get personal.
What is my look of surprise? What do I look like when something disgusts me and I'm trying to not show it but yet still showing it in a very palpable way? How do I look at my friends differently than my family? And why do I always write "friends" before "family" as an ordered pair every time? I love my family. What do I look like when I'm in love with somebody? What do I look like when I hate somebody? Do I truly have a "pokerface" or is it so easy for those closest to me to identify when I'm full of it that I needn't lie anymore because they already know what I am up to?
These are the things I wonder about.
Why do our voices sound different when we hear a recording of them as opposed to when we're actually using them? And why do we hate their sound so much? Better yet, which is our REAL voice: the sound we both hear and feel in our chest, lungs, and teeth or the voice others can measure only with their ears? Is the red, yellow, blue to me the same as red, yellow, blue to you or is it just an example or nature vs. nurture? And what if some eyes are so "colorblind" they only see in black and white but they see with such a heightened sense of luminous detail that they can still differentiate colors solely based on value alone, never mind hue, saturation, tint.
Why do some people only have 200 friends on Facebook and others have thousands? Does that correlate directly to real-life sociability or is it based on the time and effort you put in to social media? Why is it more lame to follow more accounts than be followed on Instagram, Twitter, etc.? What if everyone who has less followers than following are really just more interesting than us because they branch out into the unknown to find something...."strange".
Why do I find myself proofreading a status for Facebook, of all things to proofread, over and over again to make sure I won't "offend" anybody too, too much, but still get my point across while still sounding witty but without coming across as an egotistic asshole?
I try to notice things. See the details in that which others may not. And what is something observed exclusively for oneself but an idea people won't actually believe is yours. I guess I want to take credit for all the things I think of before others think of the same thing. Because if they think of the same thing as I have, they'll just use it on their friends like I do mine and their friends will use it further and further until it eventually makes it back to me and I say, "Hey! I thought of that!" like a disgruntled child whose friend has just STOLEN his one amazing idea in the world, only to hear a condescending, "Noooo.....I heard that awhile ago from someone you don't know." And they will Ancestry.com the idea back to who they heard it from and further and further down the line, the trail WILL lead back to me but before that can happen....
I will be labeled an immediate plagiarist.
Which I am not.
