Do I Know You?

Do I Know You?

Recently, a friend of mine (not just like, you know, a Facebook Friend) posted a status update that asked the following:

“How many of us really know everybody on our FB friends list? Here's a task for you: I want all my FB friends to post how you met me. After you comment, copy this to your status. The results just might be interesting!”

Being a somewhat of a Facebook recluse, I sent her a private message with my answer, just so she would know that we were really friends, and not just Facebook Friends, but, since 57 people so far have replied to her status, I couldn’t, in good conscience, permit my inbox to be ass-raped by all of those ensuing replies.

I mean, my sweet little inbox is just so delicate and chaste…

It’s a good question, though, just what, and just who do we “really know”? Sometimes, the people I think I know very, very well pull the rug out from under my vintage wingtips and throw me a curveball. Sometimes, the curveball is thrown right at my junkety. And that hurts. Sometimes, I’m sure I junkball the people who think they know me, too. And I’m sorry about that. It’s never nice to go below the belt.

Well, hardly ever.

There’s a woman I’ve worked with now for about three years, and it seems like, almost every other day, she says something about her personal life to me as if I’ve known it forever, and it invariably is a “news to me” comment or fact. Like, I didn’t know that she was a professional actress for her first few years out of college. When I expressed surprise at this, she looked at me incredulously.

“You didn’t know that about me?!” she asked, wide-eyed.

No, I didn’t. And sometimes I don’t think I really know anything about anybody.

“Well,” she said, “I guess it takes me a long time to get comfortable with people and share things about my life. I just don’t talk so much, I really like to listen, though.”

I like listening, especially about other people’s lives, and the choices they’ve made, but I like to talk a whole lot more. I’m a bit liberal with information I share about my own personal life, unless it’s the very personal bits, and my mouth is opened far more than it is closed. Fortunately, though, I’m not a mouth-breather. ‘Cuz that’s just nasty, bitches.

“That must be very annoying,” I replied to my coworker, “my propensity to talk about myself all the time.”

“Not really,” she replied. “You do it in that charming, obscene way.”

Charming and obscene. It’ll go on my tombstone.

It’s a good question for you to be asking yourself, too, from time to time. Who and what do you really know? Do you really know your family, or your friends, or your FB Friends, or your Blogger Buds, or your Foursquare Folks, or your sandbox pals? Do you really know yourself? You might be surprised to find out that you know less about your own peeps than you do about the homeless guy crossing 18th Street.

I was recently in downtown Philly, on 18th Street. As I was crossing, I overheard a brief exchange between two pedestrians, going in two different directions, from two different walks of life. The one was a black homeless crazy in a torn up wifebeater and shorts bearing stains of indeterminate origin, and no shoes. He had, as far as I could tell, one tooth. The other pedestrian was an impossibly hot blonde chick, maybe twenty-two years old, with tits like woodblocks, and those asinine, oversized sunglasses that maybe looked cool in 1963, a billowy white blouse, and little tweed shorts that were so miniscule that they were practically choking the life out of her coochie.

The old, black homeless crazy stopped walking directly in front of hot blonde woodblock tits and screamed,

“HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!”

He stopped, and stared at, surprisingly, her face. She looked at him, cocked her head slightly like a Springer Spaniel might, and said what was probably the only decorous thing she could think to say:

“Do I know you?”

And I thought to myself, “Oh, honey… of course you do.”