Fragmented Communication

I just cleaned my car. Trust me, this is a big accomplishment. I still have stuff in there from driving home in May.

As I was stuffing old fast food receipts, MapQuest printouts, and leftover food from eating breakfast on the way to work into my trash bag, it came to me that a person's trash can say an awful lot about them, their life, their habits. Whenever I clean out my car, or my room, or an old school notebook, I begin to think like a CSI. What would I deduce about my life if I were sifting through these things with a stranger's eyes? Take my car, for instance. An outsider could probably easily see that I eat on the go a lot, and am therefore either very busy or very often running late (just so you know, it's the latter). There was an old Starbucks card under the front passenger seat, as well as an eyeliner pencil, a visitor's guide to Bakersfield, and a handful of almonds. At any given time I'll probably have at least four half-empty water bottles rolling around. On the front seat there was a small case of dental floss, and in the back, a bag of pool goodies: goggles, diving toys, and the like.

I'm fascinated by scenes like the one of my messy car. One can pull and piece together fragments of someone's life and try to make a cohesive statement out of it, but it's never the whole picture. I feel similarly about coffee shops, restaurants, or episodes of This American Life. They are all places where diverse, often unrelated lives collide in a common intersection, and strangers are given very little to form an impression or opinion of each other. A brief encounter, an exchange of words, a glance at what someone is reading or eating. Mere snippets of someone's life, which is what, it seems, so many of our day-to-day interactions are like, even with people we know well. Can we ever fully see or know someone? Can any form of communication ever be an adequate expression of what someone thinks, or feels, or is?