I love telling stories...

I was thinking on the train to center city this morning about how much I love to tell stories. I've been feeling rather nostalgic for about a week now, and keep having flashbacks to my college days. As I was thinking about stories, I remembered how one semester I would have lunch with my friends Laura and Jordan a couple of times a week in the uppercrust dining area and I'd always have some crazy story to tell them about something that happened that morning. I never buy it when I ask people, "what's been going on?" and they say, "nothing." It's not true, something is generally happening. It's just all how you tell the story. Did exciting things happen to me every morning? No, I just made a story out of it all the time. I mean, let's face it, half the time I had spent the morning working in the Center for Social Research-- holed up in an office where my only hope for looking outside was watching the Calvin webcam. But I still had stories. I also think we have this complex as people that others don't really care about our stories. I think I've started to feel that way in the last couple years, since moving, and so I don't tell as many of my random stories as I used to.

So, I miss that. I miss telling stories all the time about the things I witness or experience. Granted, I am pretty susceptible to having ridiculous stories based on my clumsiness, or absent-mindedness (like locking my keys in my car two days in a row last December). Part of this is that I feel like I don't have a lot of people to tell stories too. My roommate hears most of my musings and story telling now a days (and, bless her heart-- my analyzing & agonizing). Last year I used to call Cicely at the most random times and tell her a story about something that just happened, but now she's in Bangladesh and it takes me a half hour just to get through to her phone. I do tell stories to other people on the phone quite often, thanks to my good friends & my mom, but they are usually the big most pressing stories, not the small funny things. So, I was considering that I should just start blogging more often again-- share my stories with the wonderful world of cyberspace. But, yesterday I had some friends over for lunch (we had Mir's wonderful Stromboli!) and we had this discussion about communication "these days". We have blogs, email, phones, etc, etc, etc... and does this take away from our ability to be fully present in the places we are physically? If I start telling stories on my blog-- does that mean I won't tell stories to the people I'm around in Philly?

Anyways, all of that leads up to this story. I was sitting on the train reading a book called "Generations Lost", a book about how our youth are being destroyed by popular culture (I'm only 40 pages in and I'm pretty skeptical) and across the aisle from me where three older women. They were chatting and laughing, and then were talking about their friend who had just been put in a nursing home. It crossed my mind how much your conversations change as you get older. Right now my friends and I talk about who's moving to what state or coutnry, or going to grad school here or there, who's getting married or engaged... they were talking about who was going to what nursing home. One time my friends and I realized we were at a different life stage because we were having a long conversation about health insurance around a campfire. Anyways, then the man who comes and takes your train tickets came up and they starting flirting with him, they had specific "senior citizen" tickets and the man said he didn't believe them, so they all pulled out their medicare cards and IDs and said, "see, I'm 65!" They giggled and laughed, and compared photo IDs. I fully enjoyed eavesdropping on this conversation because these women were so full of life and energy and proud of their age. They were proud of their medicare cards and senior citizenship. I suppose that really, they were more proud that someone thought they were younger than they actually were.

I love the train, you always learn something new about people and the way we all function. We'll see what I decide about sharing more stories with cyberspace :)