In the
mathematical sense
topology is a study of
how space can be distorted, features that change and features that remain. I was talking to my
mother a year ago about
antisociability and it surprised me to learn that she thought I was unsociable. At the time I was at a fairly unrewarding job, talking to many of my university friends every day over
email and
IRC. It was to the point where, after I made the 3500 kilometer trip to see one of them at the end of the summer, we really had no catching up to do, having talked as recently as the day before.
It struck me after some confusion that she was right in the sense that in the town where I was, I was not really spending much time with anyone. I'd get tired of talking to people I knew during the day and would sit and read or get on the computer and play games. I was unable to impress on her that my friends felt closer than a lot of the people I knew in the town I lived in at that time, most of them high school friends from whom I had started to grow apart.
I have been thinking about this sort of thing a bit and realize that I am becoming very good at long distance relationships, and developing the sorts of friendships that I can step back into very easily. I have friends whom I would feel very comfortable not talking to for a year or two, and meeting up to go on a road trip with.
On the other hand, I live in an apartment complex across from a group of five or six 23-ish year old girls. I was out on my deck reading the other night and heard them talking about pets, about how one of them had a friend's dog return home after being hit by a car. Her and her friend, seeing that the pet was too hurt to be healed, decided to end it's life. With a shovel. It took about an hour, she said, of them chasing this animal around the yard.
"It was hard work, but it sure was funny."
I would be unsure of how to speak their foreign language, even if my voice could reach across the distance between myself and wherever that group of fantastically cruel 'people' are.
I don't understand people at all, especially...most people.