Getting close to someone

I’d be thrilled if Participastory.com found a way to help people understand each other better. That might not happen, but I can at least try to point out some of the humor in human interactions. I especially like to poke fun at how we communicate. We can transmit complex formulas around the world in seconds, but even educated adults express some of the most important information – what we think about and want from each other – like little children, with eyerolls, shrugs, and “I dunnos”. Sometimes it is because we just don’t know, but I’ll have more to say about introspection at another time.

Well, now it’s time for us to take all these centuries of technological advances AND millennia of philosophical reflection and figure out how to share information about ourselves that really matters. Please don’t misinterpret me, I appreciate it when someone posts of photo of something they’re about to eat, especially if they cooked it themselves. I might get invited to a dinner party at their house and so those posts are sort of an online menu of their kitchen. But we can do better. Granted if this were easy, it wouldn’t be so hard. We’ll have to be careful. Still, I’m going to give it a try:

I like to consider myself a warm and caring human being. That said, the phrase, ‘touchy feely’ doesn’t apply to me.  I like my space. So it bothers me that a lot of times, I don’t feel like I get to fully participate in decisions to hug. Occasionally someone will say, “how about a hug?”, but more often they just open up and start to bring it in. By that point it’s often just too late to say no if I care about their feelings, which I almost always do (even though they didn’t care enough to ask, “Mind if we press our fronts together for an undetermined amount of time?”).

I expect there are others out there like me who would like a chance to do some pre hug exploration, you know verbally. I know this might strike some as cold or stiff but it’s not like I’m turning the hug into something that requires informed consent, the process of carefully evaluating the risks and benefits of an activity before engaging in it. But actually that doesn’t sound too bad. Sharing this aspect of myself is starting to generate ideas. I wonder how the the hug consent process would look?I explore in my next post.