Some dude. Some bitch. Whatever.

Saturday I went to see The Golden Compass with a rocket scientist. The most exciting thing about the entire evening was knowing that when it was over I'd be able to say that I went to see The Golden Compass with a rocket scientist.

The movie was bad and the rocket scientist was loud. Not loud like me. Louder. And he seemed like he was still in high school. We met in front of Borders and as he walked towards me he slapped his hand to his head in a d'oh kind of way and muttered something to himself about the metro breaking down. Or something.

But picture it: he's a 25 year old, 6'5" dude with a roundish middle section and thinning black hair hitting his head on the street and muttering frustratedly to himself. To say that it was comical wouldn't be entirely correct. It primarily served to highlight all of the little--and not so little--social differences between us. Nonetheless, he's an amusing character.

Some 21 year old dude (dude or kid? I'm tempted to say kid.) messaged me the other day. He's reasonable enough. And in some ways, he might be impressively reasonable for someone his age. He likes to pepper his conversation with familiar but infrequently used words like ubiquitous and lexicon. Lexicon is a favorite and occurs at least once during every conversation. I'm sympathetic towards this because I also attach myself to words that I think of as being so specific that they name precisely what I mean. Unfortunatley, we both use these words with such abandon that they become pervasive in our speech and tend to lose the quality that we valued them for originally. (I am, of course, assuming a lot about this person's motivations here--namely that they are identical to my own. This is something I do every time I meet someone new. Then I'm annoyed and disappointed when I learn that they're different from me and have desires and motivations all their own. Lame.)

Anyway...why do I want to call this guy a kid? Seriously. He's an adult. He has a job. He lives in an apartment. I imagine that his life requires him to pay bills and buy groceries and take care of countless hassles and cope with the odd moment of joy. This is--as far as I can tell--a fully formed person with opinions, thoughts, desires, faults, preferences, and probably even an inner monologue. He's even older than Sage and I have no problem thinking of Sage as a completely autonomous person with internal states (as much as I think of anyone as being completely autonomous with internal states). But wait, I think I'm characterizing this incorrectly. I don't think of this dude as incomplete or lacking autonomy or failing to somehow be a full person (inasmuch as you can actually think about such things with regard to a stranger). But if someone were to ask me, "Who's that guy you're IMing?" I'd probably say, "Some kid that messaged me the other day."

Had I met this guy through one of my friends in Morgantown, I wouldn't think of him as being younger. He'd just be some dude with whatever attributes he happens to possess. Maybe that's because when you meet someone through friends you're already roughly associated with their attributes and identify them in that way. Conversely, if you meet someone on a social networking site you have nothing with which to associate them but the information contained in their profile: "Hmm, dirigible77 is a 21 year old male that's trying to quit smoking, sometimes drinks, and owns a cat." And until you learn about other, more important attributes that's all you have.