Thinking of me?

[mrissa]

I keep a file entitled "thoughtofme." Whenever a friend or family member or acquaintance e-mails me something because they read it and thought of me, I write down what it was. I figure some of it has to be related somehow, or at least patterns may emerge. I tend to go ages without having anything to add to that file, and then having several all at once.

There have been three so far today: Finnish cheese, a Sampo ballet, and certain delicate masculine concerns in Icelandic sagas. This is more of a pattern than I usually get, really.

My favorite example of this came a few years back, when my friend Ben forgot to expand on his thought process. I got a link to an article about Gila monsters whose owner had died, and they had eaten his corpse. And the e-mail had the link in it, and said, "Thought of you. --Ben." It turns out he had read this article and thought, "They only wanted to grok him in fullness," and had figured that I was one of a small number of his friends who could be counted upon to get the reference. But he didn't say that. He didn't even say the grokking bit. Just the corpse-eating lizards and that he thought of me. I was muchly amused.

What has made people think of you? Were you flattered, or did you wish it hadn't?

Also, nobody ever says to me, "You look so much like so-and-so!" (Unless so-and-so is my mom. Then they say it a lot.) Do you look like everybody's college roommate's first sweetheart? Do you remind people of that one person they used to work with, you know, Wossname? Or do you apparently just look like you?

Comments

[scalzi.livejournal.com]

"What has made people think of you? Were you flattered, or did you wish it hadn't?"

Since I wrote two books about people doing dumb things, I get quite a lot of phone calls and e-mails from people saying "I just thought about the stupidest thing, and then I thought of you." To someone who was lacking in context, I imagine that could sound really bad.

Very few things remind me of other people, but I do have people pop up in dreams fairly frequently. I usually consider that my brain's way of telling me I need to call that person and catch up with them. I will also occassionally pop-up in other people's dreams; I think that's kind of fun, especially when I'm doing something that is not particularly characteristic. I like the idea of the dream version of me doing things I wouldn't normally do.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I use dreams of people as the same kind of signal. Sometimes I don't tell the people what the dream was. "I dreamed you died a horrible death in a car accident, and I was really sad. So how are you? Better than that, I hope?"