“Things”; People; People watching

I recently ran in to a few acquaintances from high school that I haven’t seen in some time. While we were talking, one of the people mentioned that art was always my “thing”. This was something that I commonly heard growing up, and I always went along with it. Being involved in the art department over the last few years has caused me to disassociate art from being anyone’s thing simply because so many people identify themselves with the subject (certainly more here than in the environment I grew up in). This isn’t a bad thing. I still love making art and it’s a part of who I am; it’s not mine though. This makes me wonder if there is any person who can actually claim that something they do or associate themselves with is uniquely their own.

People in general greatly influence me: my thoughts; beliefs; actions; etc. People, even complete strangers (especially in some cases), are always doing things to change the way I feel about others. For instance, my naïve opinion of others until recently was that people are generally good and will in most cases respect others and their belongings. However, someone stole my bike over the weekend, which has taken my views in a more pessimistic direction regarding individuals in society. Because people so easily influence my beliefs through their actions, I’m hoping that something else will happen in the near future to influence my opinion once again.

Moving away from my “I hate people” rant… There is something about people that I will always love. People watching. One of my favorite things to do is to sit and just watch people. I have come to find different variations of people watching. The one that I feel is the most interesting is searching for “regulars”. During my freshman year my friends and I picked out a select few people who we called regulars. They were people who were on the same general schedule as us as far as visits to the cafeteria were concerned. We would sit in the cafeteria and scan the area for our regulars (who we felt the need to give funny names to). I always found it interesting that we never planned to see these people, but somehow we almost always ended up in the same place at the same time. I feel this example fits well with my current interests in repetition and occupying time.