2023-04-30 Leaving hardly a where-are-my-people stone unturned

Sun 30 Apr 2023 08:22:08 PM CDT

I realized this morning I've spent most of my life trying to find people not as doltish as the nuclear family I grew up in.

I changed from their religion to another in late high school.

I went to a fundamentalist university after graduating from high school. My dad wept before he and my mom went back to their car after dropping me off.

The beginning of said fundamentalism unwinding for me was overhearing that John Lennon had been shot and died. That occurred during lunch break of a late night campus cleaning detail, where a coworker casually mentioned it, and he and others responded to that news in a way that would have well-represented the content of a "Meh" Wikipedia entry were there such a thing.

Then I went to a state university in my home state, a place often considered the pinnacle of decadence in that state.

After graduating, I found a nice job at the major tech company of its time in a state far, far from my home state.

I roomed outside my race.

I married outside my race.

I was quite early to the internet relative to my peers.

It's all been a search for more intelligent life.

It's mostly been a failure.

Gemini seems promising for there being a plethora of great writers whose posts I regularly enjoy. But its lack of the kind of community that would make participation effort worth it often has me wondering.

textmonger