Like I Said

I went to the gym today and saw THREE people from church. I love where I live. It's not too small, like a tiny town where everyone knows your business, but it's also not so big that there are lots of any one kind of business, so you're likely to run into people you know when running errands, etc.

People on the Street

I'm revisiting an old topic here: seeing people I know out and about. Why it pops up again today is because I'm back in California after being in Michigan for almost a month. What I realized in MI is that, even though I'm from there, I currently know more people here and live in a smaller town, so my chances of seeing someone I know out in public are actually smaller in MI than here.

It was almost sad for me to be at the mall or something in MI, see a group of teenagers, and have there be no chance that I knew them. That's weird now. It was lonely and surprising to go to Costco and not run into anyone I knew. (Disclaimer: I did see someone I knew at Costco one time in MI. I'm speaking in generalities, people!)

I'm back home now, and the flipside of this occurs to me, as it did a couple years ago: I'm not going to see anyone from my past here. I'm not going to squint at someone who walks into a restaurant and suddenly realize that it's an old friend or some random guy I had a crush on in college. Here, if I see someone I know, I am currently friends with them and there's no real surprise to see them. We'll talk. It will be normal. That's both a relief and a little bit boring.

A new conviction

I am pretty. Despite the fact that I don't take the best pictures, I'm pretty. I know this. I don't need to constantly second-guess and compare myself to other people.