I had an interaction with a sales man at a phone case store.

He looked at my extra battery charger iPhone case (because I use it a lot okay. I have a lot of friends)

He said it wasn’t very fun.

I replied with “It’s functional. And you can’t spell functional with out fun buddy.”

He said he had nothing to come back with and with that I left the store.

My brother said that I was acting sassy. Maybe I was. But that sales man did not appeal to me in the slightest. Telling me I’m boring is not the way to my heart, in case anyone was wondering.

The way to my heart, not surprisingly, is through me.

I happened to be wearing some very brand new Nike runners, my Washington Spirit warm up pants and ever-so-badassly swagger-limped around his store. There were so many things he could have said just by looking at me.

If he had mentioned anything aside from me having a boring cell phone I probably would have stayed longer and personalized an iPhone case of the No. 8 or myself or Batman or something. But he didn’t get that opportunity.

If I really want that now, which is possible, I can just order it online or maybe draw it with marker myself. No matter what, it’s probable that I won’t go back to that store.

There’s an important lesson to be learned here. A lesson everyone is fully aware of but rarely think about: we have more options than ever. We can go to any store to buy something. There are around 10 stores alone that sell running shoes in a mall. Ten stores! That sell roughly the same shoes. What separates one from the other?

Customer service. How we are treated as customers.

Aside from maybe EZ Pass and a few other companies, we get to choose who we want to buy from and work with because we live in this beautiful country. If someone is nice to me I will probably buy from them until they give me reason not to. That’s just how it works.

So that’s just with consumerism. What about life?

Yeah, well life works that now way too. Especially with people.

Guess what folks, social media, cell phones, the internet– allows for us to stay in touch with people, make new friends as much or as little as possible and be a little more picky with who we want in our lives. Some might argue this is a bad thing. Maybe we don’t treat each other as well because we’re all disposable. Back in the way back when, the people in your neighborhood or the people you went to school with were your friends. It was hard to get away from them and it was harder to meet new people in the big wide open.

Now, we can be friends with anyone from the person that lives next door to the person who likes the same song as us that lives in Japan. It really makes no difference where someone lives or what their background is, we can be friends with anyone.

And friendship is such a loose term. We’re friends. Yeah just on Facebook though. We’re friends, but just work friends. We’re friends, but we’re just on the same team. We’re friends, but just like study friends. We’re friends, but just going out friends. It’s crazy. You can have a friend for every day of the week. (Just don’t make them wear labeled underwear or anything)

So we can pick and choose who we want to be friends with. We can cut people from our lives easily because we can just go to Facebook and see who lives in the same town or something. Or if we break up with someone we can go to cuddleparty.com and make do with what comes up there. I mean I don’t recommend that but wtf is that website seriously.

Anyway. I have a few conclusions. I know my generation is very “me” focused and doing all things later than our parents like getting jobs and getting married and having kids. Because we are living our dreams and doing us and finding ourselves and whatever cliche you want to throw out there. But really, maybe we just care about ourselves more than we care about others sometimes and that makes it hard? I don’t know

I do know a few things. Just because I have lived them. I know that we keep people in our lives, we choose them over others because they bring something that others cannot. The thing about a product is that you can get the same exact thing somewhere else. People, on the other hand, are literally one in a billion. You can’t get me by the dozen unfortunately. But just imagine that for a second.

We choose the people in our lives for a reason, we might as well pay attention so we know what that reason is and whether it is actually taking us in the direction we want to go in this life.

I’ve spent hours (legit) picking out shoes. Measuring one up against the others. Trying them on, pulling my pant leg up, flexing my calf, asking everyone in the store if they like them, checking my bank account to see if it “works”, asking my mom if it can be an early birthday present four months before. I think it’s cool if we do that with people too. Because you know, if the shoe fits…yada, yada.. but if it doesn’t. Well that’s actually okay too.