Vice

So I completely told Jenna the other day about a vice of mine...
And I do it especially when driving by campus, and it's bad... but its so fun.

It's this: I like to label people. Yes, I know, isn't that completely awful of me as a person? Don't I know that if I do that, people will do it to me as well? Oh, yes, but I really find it amusing.
Maybe it stems from that time, way back when, that I loved to read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. One slight glance and he knew all about a person (how many years they had spent in China, their profession, relationship status, where they were the night of February 4th at 7 o'clock) Maybe its an innate need to categorize and sort out people, learned from years of my mum's organization skills. (which she uses for good, I might add) Or, maybe its just a device of the devil (as it appeared was Jenna's opinion!).
Now, just for clarification, I do NOT, emphatically not, approve of any type of stereotyping. I have been a sore subject of a little bit too much of that in my life! (seriously, I'm a single white female, I was homeschooled, middle-class, large family, townie, goody-two-shoes Christian kid, teacher's pet, you name it... I could probably fall under some sort of stereotyping.) Probably one of the other reasons that I have a really big heart against any sort of prejudice, cause to some extent I know how it feels.
But labeling and stereotyping are not the same thing. Stereotyping is finding out about someone, and making judgments based on one little peice of information. Labeling (at least the way that I see it) is looking at the whole of a person and their interactions (usually from a distance) and giving them sort of an honorary title. For example, I don't suppose that any of you have ever read the description for the facebook group "99% of the people that you will meet in college"? It is one of the more funny things that I have read recently. And I mean, really genuinely funny! I laughed out loud for real when I was reading it.
So the scenario goes something like this: I am driving along a certain street next to campus which has about a million crosswalks littering it making it completely impassible to cars during those unfortunate hours when everyone and their dog gets out of class. While waiting for yet another string of slow moving pedestrians to cross the street... I start to notice behaviors and subsequently label the individuals parading in front of my hood. "Miss shifty-eyes" (her honorary title) is obviously a freshman. You can tell by the way that she awkwardly shuffles her handful of textbooks, not to mention the '16-day-hike' looking backpack which undoubtedly houses her entire collection of other textbooks. I swear she checks the street 3 times both ways before crossing even though I'm sitting here perfectly stopped, and the cross signal has been activated. Then there is "Covered Cory". This bright young individual never fails to hit the cross walk signal on his way by... bother the part where its already blinking away, and my vehicle is perfectly stopped. If anyone does decide to run him over, at least he'll be covered in a court of law, cause "by george, he pushed that button!" Then there is "Jogger Judy" who looks like she could run circles around campus all day and not look just as sweaty as she does now, or "Workout Wayne" who, quite honestly just needs to 'get 'emself a girl' because working out that much just isn't healthy. Not to mention the instructors that you see, and oh, boy, half the time you can tell just from watching them, that there's a lot of things you would rather do than sit in their class, (like for example mowing 8 acres of grass in 98 degree weather in a sweater, with scissors) ... see how interesting it is?
It may be vice, but I think its fun...