-Mke Kennelly
Hello to the eight people who are reading this blog. I am Kennelly, and a friend of the other three who are the real contributors to this thing. After my ever insightful “Karma’s a bitch” comment on JLE’s last article and due to the extended period of inactivity, I was invited to write a guest post or whatever the frell its called, and I have insomnia, so here’s the result.

Last night, through a very long night of “sharing my feelings” with people I never in a million years I would share my feelings with I came to realise some stuff about levels of familiarity with other human beings, and how that makes us feel about them.

It starts with what I am going to refer to as people. People are awesome, and I love people, and I want the best for them. They include the 6.5 billion human beings you will never ever know a single thing about or see aside from as an indistinct individual in a crowd. If you’re reading this, you’re a “people” to me. The most familiar “people” you will ever interact with a long period of time is, for example, the guy in the deli who you always get coffee from. But the guy in Shanghai or the Sudan or some other place that begins with a “S” whose just trying to scrape together a living, there all also people. South America, that’s another place that begins with an “S” and it continues my City-Country-Continent progression. And those three words all begin with “C”s.

Anyways, I love people. I hope you love people too. I love people because all I know about them is their potential for good. I have never seen any ugliness in their “soul” (which is a metaphor based on centuries of philosophy, not an actual construct (or something)) so I want them to be able to accomplish something awesome. Like Einstein or Ghandi or something. Because ultimately, all human beings are so similar, and each one of us is capable of great things. I sound like a frakking kindergarten teacher, but because I don’t know anything about most “people”, it’s true.

The next level is what I call persons. Persons suck. They are human beings that you know enough about to see the flaws in their character and allow those flaws to cause you to abandon your Kindergarten-Teacher optimism about them being people and decide that they suck and are a worthless waste of space. Like your boss, or the annoying kid who has all the answers in class, or the kid who always showed up to class stoned, or politicians, or Joe Buck. Gods, I hate Joe Buck so much. In the process of hating individuals, you forget that they are people, and you just start to dismiss their existence. Nothing they do will convince you that they will ever amount to anything worthwhile, and you just make presumptions about their inherent suckitude.

A subset of persons are “irrelevants”, who are people who you know to well to consider people, don’t hate enough to be considered true persons, but don’t know well enough to consider part of the next category, individuals. So these people are just irrelevant, you don’t care about the guy who works with you on physics homework, but don’t really ever see besides that. There’s nothing bad about that guy to make you hate him. You just don’t hang out with him or know anything about him or his life. So he’s irrelevant. And that’s a terrible thing to consider a person.
If anyone who was in Albanese’s Physics C is reading this and thinks I’m talking about them, I’m not, and I’d feel horrible if you did. This is a guy I know in college. You guys were all invited to my house to play Rock Band, and that makes you individuals.

Most people I meet I immediately throw into this second category, and don’t allow to reach the final category of individual. Eventually, every person can become an individual. Because if you force yourself to see past someone’s suckitude in the “person” stage, I think that inevitably once again find out enough good thins about them so that you’ll think they can do something Einstein or Ghandi great, or even like the guy who invented the little plastic things on the end of shoelace great, and that’s good enough. And also, you’ll have a friend, and friends are good things to have.

Now this is far from and accurate scientific or sociological or psychological study, and please don’t take it or criticise it as such. It’s incredibly broad and nonsensical. But if you are reading this, I hope you can identify on at least some level with what I’m saying. If you do, then recent experiences have made me realise that you should go out and try and turn some of your persons into individuals. You don’t have to do all of them, because that’s impossible. One, some of them probably consider you a person too and hate you. Two, you’re not going to be able to interact with everyone you have to see regularly enough to know deep enough aspects of their personality that they will achieve individual status. And three, somewhere in every human beings’ DNA is the command to just hate somebody. It’s inevitable that there will be someone you know that epitomises what you hate about our race. But take baby steps and try to be ballsy and take a chance on making a person into an individual.

Except for Joe Buck. Screw Joe Buck. I know Feagles is the oldest player to ever be in the Super Bowl. Shut up.