So, last night I ended up at a house party in EL. I expected to see the group of friends that had invited me, but not many other people I knew. About 10 minutes after arriving, I ran into an absurd amount of unexpected faces. Somehow I ended up knowing about half the people at the party.

One unexpected person was this one girl who was in an Intro to Feminist Philosophy course that I took the first semester of my senior year. I recognized her, but only to the extent that I knew that i’d seen her before. On MSU’s campus, even though there are 40,000+ students, recognizing people is incredibly too common. It’s odd how often I run into the same people around campus, outside of class, even though there are so many people on and around campus. I would think that the probability of running into a random person from a class at some party outside of school would be incredibly small, yet this small world syndrome seems to crop up all the time and show just how, even on a campus of 40,000, everyone knows everyone.

Anyways, back to the story. Her name was Erin. She was the one that remembered that we took a class together over a year ago. Every philosophy class tends to have at least one person who plays devil’s advocate, and in this class I was that person. Sure, it rubbed many of the women in the class the wrong way. How could this guy come in here and question this stuff? As a philosopher though, it was my duty. One sided philosophy is nothing more than useless ego stroking. I must have made an impression on her though, because even after a year and a half, she remembered my name in an instant. The entertaining part was that she didn’t remember my friend Tony’s name, and he was her partner for an in-class project.

Seeing that I left such an impression put me in a great mood the rest of the night. Sure it was a semester’s worth of hearing me talk that did it, but the end result is the same. Someone remembered me. That may seem like nothing, but having that impact without formally meeting someone gives quite the ego boost.

The events of last night made me realize that I want to have that ability, to leave a vivid enough impression on people that they remember me years later. The challenge is reducing the amount of time that is necessary to create such an impression from five months in the same class, to something within the first few hours of meeting someone. I need to think about this more to figure out what steps I can actually take to actually accomplish this task.

It’s odd how a feminist philosophy course taken on a whim my senior year of college could still be coming back into my life and teaching me things.