Sociology in Question

Today was my first day of my sociology course and while it isn't anything I've not gone through before (I'm only taking it because Hiram is paranoid that the combined courses of Cultural Mysteries and Social Psychology didn't expose me to ENOUGH sociology: ergo, it did) something the professor said still resonated with me. She went over how sociology is just scientific people watching and went on to ask us how many of us have ever looked into someone's window at night while we drove by. Admittedly, we all had.

In paraphrase she went on to say, "Were they having a happy dinner? Like a big family dinner where everyone was sitting around the table and mom and dad and grandma and grandpa were all there? And so was Uncle Gary, playing with the kids. But it would be a totally different story if it were Uncle Bob would have shown up instead, right? Who knows what he's into in his free time. Or one step further, maybe what looks like a family dinner is actually a cannibalistic blood ritual."

And, while I know that you never know someone's whole story just by observing them I think that this drives home that point and more. To really experience someone's day to day life, their own personal biography or sociologic day-to-day tendencies, you honestly have to engage in it with them. To be empathetic, to partake, to go through it step by step and have them teach it to you. And when you do that does it make their taboos and their abnormal tendencies that abnormal? How much of them do you become? It's a hard fabric to unweave and, really, maybe we just aren't meant to. Rather, maybe it's best we don't question these things and just go about our lives engaging in our own weird tendencies/habits and continue on as understanding of those that others partake in as well.