people.

I'm taking a break from my day of work, in part because I'm not getting much done and would rather write during this period of futility...

It's a weird Monday today...hard to explain but I'm sure people around me can tell. In part I am simply tired and out of it. At the same time my mind is also elsewhere and I in many ways desire to be elsewhere myself. The weekend provided a multitude of things to think about and reasons to wonder...especially about people. Not any people in particular but in a more general sense.

There are a pretty small number of people I would say I know really, really, really well. My definition of "really, really, really well" is knowing someone to the point where you can easily and accurately predict their behavior, likes, dislikes, etc. For example, as I sat reading in a cafe yesterday I turned to my friend and said to him: "She's the type of lady I see you settling down with one day." He responded something like: "If you asked me, I would have told you the same thing." He is one of the handful or so of people I feel I know that much about and am that close to.

My problem is that I sometimes don't realize how short that list is in reality. It's not unfortunate to have a short list for such people, in my opinion you can only have a short list [altho I'm sure I know a much larger number of people to do a pretty decent job and predicting their reactions to various things and so on]. The list is, in the end, my core group of closest friends and family. My tendency is to be trusting with people and accept things at face value. [As if often the case on my blog I am not doing a good job explaining this particular thought.]

Yet at times in interacting with people the fact that I only know a certain amount of information about them reveals itself. It's not a bad thing for the most part and I'm sure it's a two-way street. In the end people are just interesting. Their words and actions are interesting. Their motivations are interesting. Sometimes things are as simple as they seem but at other times it's more complicated. It's just funny when you come across a disconnect between what you do know about the person [and thus your expectations of said person] and how the person responds/reacts [or possibly who the person really is as a person].

I'm not sure exactly why this is a topic I'm thinking about. Some of it is motivated by interactions with people I know over the weekend. Part of it is just my simple nature, I really enjoy people watching and this all kind of follows along with that. The flipside of all of this is that there are times when you don't think your know someone as well as you actually do.

So...in reality I have been jumping back and forth between rambling and working...not a good way to maintain a train of thought [but a way to give my mind brief respites from working/thinking]. People are funny and it's funny the various roles they play in our lives and that we play in theirs. You can try all you want but in the end it seems like a lot of that [the roles played] just comes about on its own and is something that can't be forced...no matter how much you want to play a certain role in someone else's life or have someone as a certain role in your life. You to play certain roles and know people based on the roles they play in your life and all of this has an effect on how well you end up knowing someone...whether you really, really, really know them or just really know them.

As is often the case...this has become incoherent babbling on my part [I really believe it started out strong tho...at least with some promise].