Stranger in Town: Teenage America

Granted, the title is a little misleading given that I'm teetering on the edge of twenty. That aside, being in this limbo-ish age is so very strange. High school made sense, if only for the ease of direction when you didn't really have one. I spent most of my years in public school aimlessly drifting and never really applying myself. The one class that really spoke to me back then was a series of agriculture courses I was technically forced to take due to clerical issues (I'm sure this speaks to the region I'm from lol). When you live a rural life, it's hard to make a job out of base level horticulture knowledge, so I wound up in university with no idea what I was doing.

Truth be told, I have no idea what I'm doing in the slightest. I've said before that I'm not in university currently due to my A+ mental health, but even with that aside, it's hard to figure out who you are as a person when you spend your life drifting from one interest to the next without any real-life application. 

I once met a strange fella on a sidewalk during my very brief time at uni. I was sitting on a short stone wall, having a wee smoke (I don't endorse underage smoking, don't do what I did kids), and this guy crosses the highway wearing a short brimmed sunhat, black leggings with white eclectic stripes, and a pair of slides. He comes over to me and asks if I have a spare smoke. We sat and talked for a while, maybe ten minutes total, but he told me I was "too pretty to smoke." I wasn't sure if I should have been offended or not, at the time it seemed like a dig at my misguided independence. I still don't really know what to think about that interaction, but now I'm trying to quit. 

Around the same time, I was taking a creative writing class. The professor was a strange fella too, which we only got bits and pieces about his life between his unconventional approaches to the material. One such assignment came in the form of being asked to eaves drop. I was out getting a late smoke one evening (again, don't do the things I did), and yet another stranger passed me by. Living in a city means endless strangers, but the assignment was on my mind pretty heavy. He was on a white bicycle, heading down the backroad less taken and talking to someone over speaker phone. He said something along the lines of "helping people that won't help you." He probably said more than that to whoever was listening on the other end, but I found that statement alone to be profound at the time. I have no idea who he was talking about, but he seemed entirely sure of his words. I still wonder where he was going. 

I don't really care much for bureaucracy or sitting in front of a computer for eight hours straight trying to meet a deadline. I absolutely love meeting strange people though. If I hadn't taken a chance on education I wouldn't have met these folks, or any of the other countless strangers that told me their brief and yet fascinating stories. I think that makes the debt worth it.

Moral of the story for all you at home, even if you don't do it for yourself, you can always do it for the story.  Maybe you'll meet a stranger with a story to tell, or maybe a story will fly by you on the back of a white bicycle. Maybe you'll be the stranger. Don't let adulthood make you any less strange.