Significance

It feels really good when people are interested in knowing you. I'm not talking about girl-guy relationships, but any kind of friendship or acquaintanceship or interaction. It feels good when people are interested in getting to know you, when they ask you questions, when they want to know you, and the way they ask, their eye contact, tone, what they ask, etc.

You can pretty much tell from your first interaction with someone, if they care at all. and then along the way of the friendship/acquaintanceship, their interest level might randomly increase due to a variety of reasons, or slowly decrease. Or remain constant. Or slowly decrease and then at some occurrence/knowledge, spike up. Or increase exponentially, then die off. Etc.

The things that spark people's interest are quite interesting and vary from crowd to crowd, person to person.

At work, my Chinese coworkers are interested in me because I'm American, and because I go to Cornell.

Among the interns, at the house parties, I notice when I'm ignored and what type of person tends to ignore me, and what type of person I can have a conversation with. And I notice what other people do, gesture-wise, tone-of-voice-wise, and what they say, to carry on a fun conversation/interaction with those who would ignore me. Sometimes I take mental notes.

What's my point? What do we want? We want to be important, significant, to be loved, to be valued. And sometimes we feel that certain things need to be improved or changed for us to gain more recognition/respect/love. Maybe we need to dress better, to smile more, to open doors for people, to be funny, to be deep, to act genuine, to have more facial expressions, to be proactive, to help people, to study harder, to be on time, to be clean, to sacrifice, to be more responsible, to be interesting, to be able to fix things, to be knowledgeable, to read more, to speak more languages, to be taller, to be more athletic, to have better family relations, to go to seminary, to have firm handshakes, to have better posture, to be fit, to hug people non-awkwardly, to be a better writer, to have experienced pain, to have gone to places, to have influential connections, to have talent, to have straight hair, to have a taller nose, to have a beautiful voice, to be a leader, to be nice, to not care, to watch sports, to play guitar, to have money to spend, to be easy-going, to say profound things, to touch people's shoulders when speaking, to have whiter teeth, to be healthy, to have fewer issues, to have a best friend, to be in control, to have goals, to not have goals, to be a natural, to talk faster, to talk slower, etc.

I remember in high school, the last day of school of my junior year, I was really bummed out when the person before me who finished his final was able to give the English teacher a hug, but when I finished my final, the teacher didn't get up from her desk to give me a hug. I even waited for a few seconds. From that final on, I made it my goal to hug the rest of my teachers after my final in their classes to make up for the epic fail. My friends gave me tips, saying that I needed to hold my arms out so they know I want a hug. It was pretty dumb now looking back. Yet I still haven't improved much in social ability.

So yes, I have been taking more mental notes lately. It can be good if I use it as a tool to relate to people better. It can be bad if I base my self-confidence on how greatly I improve in the areas I take mental notes on.

This is all kind of pointless. Yet we have to adjust a bit to meet people where they are, to better relate to people, to gain some trust, to get into the world. But never forgetting where our identity lies, that God is all we have and God is who we need. That He loves us and His desire is for us.