I too wish people were more open to conversations with strangers. I personally love having a good conversation with someone I don’t know. However, I think we are all a little insecure, in that we worry about what others around us will think, or what the person we choose to strike up the conversation with will think. Let’s face it… We’re all a little afraid of rejection.

It’s an interesting point you bring up. I will be interested to see the outcome when I read on.

&, your comment reminds me of that movie, Spy Game, or something; where Brad Pitt is the spy, trying to get as much information out of the random without actually revealing anything about yourself. . . and the trick is to ask them lots of questions about themselves.

But, generally i don’t talk to randoms because i don’t believe it is a safe or wise thing for me, as a girl, to do.

If it’s a little old lady at the bus stop, sure. . . I can talk for hours about her grandson’s inability to commit to his girlfriends or how the Germans are secretly still running the world.
(And i have actually had both those conversations with little old ladies on buses).

But, if it’s a guy, i will ignore him.

Perhaps that is unnecessarily cynical of me; to assume that all young (or old) men have bad intentions, but i would rather be safe than sorry. And, i feel that men often get the wrong idea when young women initiate conversation with them in public settings.

You, however, Tiger, have such a sincere face and bubbly personality, that i am sure you will do very well at talking to and becoming friends with all manner of randoms that you should happen to meet.

“He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive….He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals–of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself.”

And later:

“The man in the suburban street is quite right if he goes to Ramsgate for the sake of Ramsgate–a difficult thing to imagine. But if, as he expresses it, he goes to Ramsgate “for a change,” then he would have a much more romantic and even melodramatic change if he jumped over the wall into his neighbours garden. The consequences would be bracing in a sense far beyond the possibilities of Ramsgate hygiene.”

In the same chapter he critiques society and says we are happy to just live in our own clique and not get to know anyone else:

“The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men….
But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness… It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge…etc…”

(Sorry for the long quotes, Chersterton takes awhile to say anything in this book)

But good luck with talking to strangers, it does sound like a good experiment. People like to talk about themselves, so if you keep asking them questions, they will probably keep talking.