High Quality Humans

I have just returned from Cleveland, where a lovely apartment was leased for Emily, Felicia, and myself. You can ask them for details.
Cleveland is a great place, from what I can tell. I stereotyped it as a large city with mean people--driven to even more extremes of negative actions by the huge poverty level of the city. But we didn't run into any of that, really. Granted, we were mostly in a suburb known as Lakewood. However, the overall experience left me with a warm general feeling towards humankind. First, we wandered around a very run down neighborhood that both my parents wouldn't even drive through. But no problems--someone did yell out a car window a racist remark, but I think it was more of hitting on the girls than anything else. We walked around for a couple hours trying to find a decent place--the sidewalks were covered in dirt, and there were no businesses that remained, well, in business. It was all just shit. Barely any people around, even. As we finally found a subway station, a man started talking to us. He explained to us more about the transit system than we wanted to know, even missed his train because he was showing us all the routes and explaining why its cheaper to get a 7 day pass. He told us to watch out for people, and stay off crack. He asked nothing in return. He was just a nice guy that took time out of his day to help strangers, even strangers of a different race (which, as he explained, would have been sacreligious in Cleveland 20 years ago).

And the first woman who showed us an apartment took us to a nearby park and explained that this park was all around Cleveland, so no matter where we lived we would be near it.

And the woman who we are renting from, Linda, made a special trip on Thursday night to get our credit checked out before we left this morning--she said she wanted to maker sure it all got taken care of before we left Cleveland.

So I guess the lesson I learned, is don't misjudge people. They can be nice for the sake of being nice.

I kind of have a theory that paranoia and distrust are the beginnings of selfishness and deceit in people. That is why is seems to me so important to keep a positive idea of human nature.