Day 0: Untapped Potential

6,840,507,003.

That was the Earth's population in back 2010. (According to World Bank. Leave it to the banks to know exactly how many people they can take money from.)

7.

That is the number of people I spoke to today. (Not including email, and facebook.) Four of those people I am virtually required to speak to as they are in my research group. That leaves my roommate, a classmate, and the terse Japanese lady that I buy chicken teriyaki from every Tuesday as the sources of my outside-world interaction.

Graduate school, and probably any aspect of "grown-up life" for that matter, leaves little time or energy for recreational socialization. The grind of the laborious workday starts early and ends late, lingering in our minds well after we have stumbled home to our quiet and empty households. Some Wheel of Fortune, a bit of primetime television (complete with laugh tracks to tell your burnt-out brain when to think something is funny), and one final check of the email (because maybe your boss just remembered he wants you to do something right away!) and it's off to bed. The monotony of such a life is what I believe drives us to find great pleasure is escapism. Take TV shows like Terra Nova and Lost or movies like Avatar and Inception. These larger than life stories are what take us out of the doldrums of our own lives and into the world where exciting things actually happen. Imagine that! A life that isn't the same thing over and over and over...

It's this same type of lifestyle that makes bars so appealing (we are leaving sex out of this right now) on the weekend. The alcohol helps shrug off the social ineptitude that has accumulated through 5 days of solitary confinement, and the congregation of people in one building makes us hopeful we'll find at least someone that's interesting.

I've never been a big fan of this sort repetitious "living." And yet I just realized recently that I've fallen victim to it. You wouldn't expect to learn an important life-lesson from a Will Ferrel movie, but I did just that when watching "Stepbrothers" the other day. Towards the end of the film, we see the two once unemployed grown-up-man-children, Brennan and Dale, suddenly suited up, straight laced, and working at their equally depressing jobs. At the sight of his two soulless sons, the father takes them both aside and tells an extremely strange but insightful story. To make a short story (46 seconds) even shorter, Dale and Brennan's father tells them that his father made him stop acting like a raptor, and while he planned on being a dinosaur again one day, he woke up and eventually realized he'd forgotten how.

(You can see the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8gY0IT0CuA)

Put simply, the father is telling them that while being grown up and responsible is good, if you aren't careful, you'll wipe out your inner-youth.

So that's where this idea sprang from: I'm not going to lose my raptor.

Forget the stories on TV, there are currently close to 7 billion people on Earth waiting to share theirs. Forget the weekends, there are 5 other perfectly good days of the week to hear these stories.



This blog will highlight my attempt to meet a new person every day for the next 30 days. 

I will share with you the entire situation, where I was, what I was thinking, what we talked about, and any thoughts afterwards. Obviously not every day will feature a thrilling conversation. Perhaps nobody will want to talk to me, so I'll only be able to tell you about the grocery store clerk that I was able to glean at least one bit of information from.

With that in mind, I've made some basic guidelines that I'd like to follow while doing this challenge:

• I cannot tell anyone that I am speaking to that I'm only speaking to them because I want to fulfill my blog-promise.
• I have to speak to all types of people, not just attractive women. (Although we all know I wouldn't have the guts to do that anyways.) This includes people of all races, sexes, shapes, sizes, whatever.
• How I decide whether or not to talk to the person will be based on a few signs, including but not limited to: initial eye contact, we are both waiting for something, sitting on the bus, standing in the elevator, the person is doing something I find interesting.
• Every day I must speak to at least one person, and ask something about them. If I haven't asked them a personal question, the encounter is not counted as a conversation. I am looking for stories here, and the best way to start one is by setting the scene. For that reason, personal questions are both good background for when I blog, but also an invitation for them to tell me more.
• No feeling stupid or embarrassed for talking to people. I'm pretty sure at one point I didn't have this strange phenomena, but over the years I've become scared of speaking to people. I think a large part of it is due to my ability to give terrible first impressions. Whatever the reason may be, I'm going to have to get over it for this experiment to work. 

So there you have it. I'm fully aware that some people might not be willing to share anything with me. For all I know, I might only get a few sentences out of people 29 days in a row. But it will all be worth it, if on that 30th day, someone shares an inspiring story.

After all, there are 6,840,507,003 stories out there. I'd say I should be able to find at least one.