About Me

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I'm not doing this project to necessarily make new longterm friends, or go have a drink with these people. Nor is it to pass any judgements on ones life. My goal is to simply meet interesting, and maybe not so interesting strangers who I wouldve never taken the time to talk to otherwise. One that may differ, or perhaps relate to my own life. So many times, you walk past someone, and they wont even raise their head in the slightest to say hello. I'll never understand why. The challenge to myself is not only to surpass that simple hello with one person a day, but to convince them to look into my lens and tell me something about themselves. My name is Amanda Surkin, and this is my journey of meeting 100 new faces. Take the time to listen, you may learn something :)

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Stranger #80-

Meet Ian.

"I'm from Maine. I've traveled pretty much around the world except for seven countries. I love scuba diving; I've been doing it since I was 10. I was the youngest to be certified in all of Maine. A lot of people say that you've got to do the coral reef, and I've done that, but I actually enjoyed scuba diving in Alaska the most. I got accepted to 36 different colleges, 5 with full scholarships. I chose a smaller school because of family influence. I mean, I don't want to be known by family names, I want to be known for me. I was accepted into Harvard, Yale, and most of the Ivy league schools, and my family is all well connected to them. I don't want to be a legacy. Yeah, money would be nice but how do I know that I got in for myself? I'm from somewhere small, in little old Maine, and I wanted to be near a big city.

I've been with my girlfriend for 3 years, I met her on campus, and she got me into sewing and crocheting. We made 177 stuffed animals and then donated them to a children's hospital. We bought everything, and then sewed everything together. I have 7 close guy friends. One is gay, and lives with his husband, but he also has a wife. They're all ok with living with each other because she says that there is never a dish in the sink, toilet seat is never up, and when she doesn't feel like having sex, he's there for him. They take her on vacations for months at a time. They're filthy rich so they'll rent out a beach front condo and stay there for a month. Her name is Helen, and we found her in India. She was kidnapped from the states when she was 5, and taken to India. She was a prostitute, and we found her stabbed on the ground. I called for emergency, and wound up giving her a blood transfusion or she wouldn't have been able to live. Now she is a blood analyst. She was told that she would never be able to have kids, but she's pregnant with twins. They have so much money, and they're so picky that they've changed the paint in the nursery 186 times. My other friend is a designer, and he is also rich, and gay. He wont get out of bed unless he is guaranteed to make at least ten million dollars for his work. One time he flew into Philadelphia and we went to the Willow grove mall. He brought dresses that no one has ever seen before, and he dressed me up as a drag queen in all of them. We were in Sears, and I was wearing one of his dresses, and an employee came up to me, and said "we don't have anything for your kind here", and a random stranger clocked him in the head. The manager appeared out of no where, and apologized, and gave me a $500 gift card. Of course, I acted all sad and cried in my shoulder, so it was worth it.

Another guy friend I met on a cruise I was traveling on, and he was getting married to his male partner. Somehow I got into the wedding which was on the ship, and him and his partner were celebrating. Either one of them has never drank alcohol before, and my friends partner happened to be allergic to alcohol. They were drinking wine, and his partner died right on the spot on their wedding day, right in my arms. Now we're friends. All of the guys I'm close with are rich, they all have money. I don't know what they see in me. They look at me in such high regard. It's funny, when we all go out to dinner, they'll have their Benz, hummers, lambos lined up and then there's my little Honda pilot. but when we're at the dinner table, they'll put me at the head of the table. It's crazy, but we've been friends since I was 9. I'm the connector, I keep us all together."- Ian

I have to admit, there was much more. Due to his concern of his own safety, and other students on campus that he chose to tell me about (that could possibly be reading), and has "blacklisted him" (his words), I told Ian that I wouldn't put anything on the blog that he had, in confidence, asked me not to. So, I'm doing just that, and keeping my word. I will say that we talked for almost a good two hours, and the stories only got more bizarre. To say the least, it was a pretty interesting day.

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