The short answer:

Not at all. Or am I?

The long answer:

As you may recall, I am a hamster. I don’t like interacting with other people. The truth is that I don’t really like people, in that I would not like to take a road trip of any length with most people. Therefore I am definitely not a people person. (For all you psychology buffs out there, my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is INTJ.) But that wasn’t a very long answer, so of course there’s more to this story.

During my senior year of high school, I was in contention for a scholarship to attend a certain university. In order to make their final decision, they invited some forty students to visit for a weekend to interview for the ten or so scholarships. Before we showed up, they asked us to fill out an information sheet with some odd questions, such as “Name three books that you can never talk enough about.” I did not take it very seriously.

While they were conducting interviews, we all hung around outside, asking our fellow applicants how it went as they came out. The consensus was unanimous: it was awful. These were three-on-one deathmatches. The interviewers seemed determined to charbroil everyone and then serve a catered dessert. One guy, who had named Machiavelli’s The Prince as one of his three books, had been asked point-blank to summarize Chapter XVII. Someone else had literally been asked to justify his own existence. Another had been driven to tears. Another, spontaneous combustion.

Since I felt that I was especially bad at talking to people, I was a little nervous when it came time for my interview. After some introductions, someone asked about one of my three books, 1984, and my thoughts on privacy. I wasn’t really prepared to talk about this, so I gave a vague answer and then waited for the iron maiden to close. Luckily, another interviewer jumped in with a question that I had secretly been counting on and one that she had clearly been dying to ask: “I’m kind of curious as to why you put down The Cat in the Hat as one of your three books.” At that moment I thought to myself, wow, I’m a genius.

I was pretty relaxed for the rest of the interview, and it was a little surprising how natural it felt. Finally, for the last question, they asked: if you had a year to do whatever you wanted, and all expenses would be taken care of, what would you do? This is the sort of question that I would ordinarily say has no wrong answer, except that in reality I wanted to do nothing all day except perhaps swim through a giant money bank like Scrooge McDuck. And so, even though I am usually a very honest person, I made something up, and this is what I said.

Awhile ago I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were discussing how many people you get a glimpse of on the average day, on the street or wherever, just living their lives. Obviously it depends on who you are, but we concluded that for a typical person, it was hundreds, potentially thousands. That comes out to maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year. But how many people do you really know? You have maybe dozens of good friends, and maybe only hundreds of acquaintances, most of whom you don’t know that well. Even if you’re popular, you see many, many, more people in one year than you will ever know on a personal level. And each of these people carries with them a piece of the human experience that you will never know anything about. So I think I’d like to spend a year just meeting people, you know? Every day, I’d go out and find someone and just talk to them, try to really get to know them, find out who they are and what it is I’ve been missing out on.

I ended up getting the scholarship, and even though I didn’t end up attending the school, I still remember the interview for two reasons. First, the fact that I was so comfortable talking by the end indicated that, hey, maybe I could be a people person if I really wanted to. Second, maybe my last answer wasn’t as much of a lie as I thought it was. Maybe I would like to try going out and making real, human connections with other people. Perhaps the thing that’s been missing from my life has been an appreciation of other people’s lives.

Of course, I still find talking to people hard, and I still don’t know many people very well, nor they me. I guess that’s just my personality, so I’m fine with that. But I’d still like to think that one day, somehow, I’ll figure out a way for this hamster to break out of this cage and find out just what I’ve been missing.

Road trip, anyone?

Cheers,
-qm