Lost in Your World

Wherever you grow up and things you learn and know.. everything seems to be how it is. It makes sense and you understand it, for the most part. Walking only when the light tells us to. Stopping at the stop sign. Red, yellow, green: go. Going to school. Doing what you're told, unless you don't want to. The legal drinking age vs. the age when people drink. Laundry machines, laptops, microwaves, fridges, radios, nintendo, toilets, toilet paper.

One Eyeland Lost Astronaut. 

Brutal mutilation of female genitals, men in charge, slaves, hierarchies, kidnappings, shootings, bathing in a river, walking.. everywhere, working, AIDS, orphaned.

Or maybe not.

Crowded streets, pick-pockets, bargaining.

There are so many possibilities and obviously it is easier for me to think of what happens in my life and not in some other world that is only a sea away. Every place is so different and the way people live is what they're used to and it's just what is. Not everyone has internet or food or laptops or skytrains. And their lives aren't worse because of it; they're just different. They have their own way of living and their own hobbies. Collecting stamps or pennies is not something that you'd see an adult in a tiny village in Asia do.

I went to a CWY meeting the other day and the speaker had done cwy a few years ago. Her counterpart was the 'princess' of her village. She bossed the speaker around and treated her like a slave, because that's what she knew. She didn't know what a laundry machine was, nor how a toilet worked, but she felt that she was better and more important than anyone else.
Then other people are lower in their hierarchy and would be the opposite. Quiet, less educated, but still just as foreign to the concept of what we have here. Sure some places are 'better' and have 'nicer' things and whatever. I'm not trying to say that we're so great because we can do laundry without leaving the house.. I'm just thinking that it's so strange how we don't think about the lives of others very often or what they do or don't do, because we're so comfortable with our own. I couldn't even complete a list of things that other people have that we don't, because I don't know!

I went to driving classes during Spring Break and didn't learn much, but one thing that I found interesting was when the instructor drew a pie chart and put a dot on it and said "This dot represents what you know." and then he pointed to the rest of the circle and said "This is what you don't know." and then he drew the dot into a piece of the pie chart saying it was vastly enlarged.. so he could show us what was inside of it. He split it and wrote 'Things you know you know' in one half and 'Things you know you don't know' in the other. Then he wrote 'Things you don't know you don't know.' into the rest of the circle. Things you don't know you don't know is most knowledge in the entire world. We know NOTHING.
Just so you know.