Problem Solving, Act II

Now on to the second part and the point I was originally heading toward. Wait no, not point... but subject.

Last time I mentioned that I'm an introvert, the very definition in some instances. These days, I found I don't socialize outside of family and my roommates very often, though I won't go into the reasons of why... Aside from there being lots and lots of stupid people and stupid annoys me. Willful ignorance and stupidity annoys me rather. I believe I said it before, but my tolerance has also dwindled lately, and that doesn't help me much. BUT... people are also pretty awesome and have interesting stories and things to share.

Sometimes, maybe once every two weeks, I'll eat out during a lunch break at a restaurant. I've found an activity during these times that I actually enjoy. Now that I think about it, this is a completely separate thing from the previous post, but hey, here we go. All the restaurants here, or at least the ones I go to during these times, have fairly small dining areas. It's all fast food, gotta go with that since the lunch break isn't that long. (Actually they give an hour, but I only take roughly half an hour.) Most of the time (all except once) there's someone sitting alone. Instead of taking an empty seat, I'll approach the lone diner and ask if I can sit at his/her table. I have yet to have anyone turn me down, and I always try to ask in such a way that doing so won't leave an awkward feeling.

I suppose one reason for this is having some way of socializing during this time when my social life is at a minimum, but really, I simply enjoy this. What I do is start a conversation with the person I sit with. In most cases though, they actually initiate it first. I imagine it must also be odd that I wouldn't choose an empty seat. The purpose is really what it appears to be, simply talking with someone. It never gets personal, only being a simple exchange of stories based on whatever topic comes up and I've found that people have lots of interesting things to say.

There are times when I see more than one person sitting alone. In this scenario, my targets are usually middle-aged to older people. The reason is probably self-evident, being that they have more life experience and more interesting experiences to draw from for this short encounter. There's no high goal for doing this. It's only to see what people have to say on any number of topics. The conversations typically never go past 20 minutes. I'm on lunch and since it's a lone person at a fast food place during normal lunch hours, odds are, they have somewhere to be as well, which works great in both of our favors. Since it's a new person every time, there's virtually a 0% chance of not having something to talk about.

Next time, we get to DT stuff with the possibility of a side thing that my brother's wife does.