Hello there and welcome, it is nice of you to drop by my little corner of the internet.  My name is Connor Kleppinger and this is my blog, a general catch-all for my thoughts and opinions.  This journey is extremely fresh and confusing so for now, I will just type what comes to me and see what my mind unravels.  I do not have the concrete idea that every “Intro to Blogging” video has demanded I have.  I have merely a feeling and determination to break ground on this exciting new journey.

I am a firm believer in the notion that the best ideas come to you while in the shower.  I have had hundreds of ideas and breakthroughs, including this one, while standing under the water and it remains one of the few places of complete isolation and comfort in my mind.  This may seem ironic in other contexts but my brain stands by it and I internalize it as such.  This is all brought up to say that this very website and blog and rambling all stems from a main goal: to give my thoughts voice and have a place to catalog these ideas.

I have always believed that the greatest threat to humankind and our survival is ignorance.  Ignorance may be bliss as they say but the creator of that saying gained their greatest achievement in life via putting those three words together (In case you were wondering, the phrase was coined by Thomas Grey, poet from the 18th century).  The lack of knowledge or insight is what ails every one of us and it does not discriminate in the slightest.  As an individual, as a culture or a society, as a total population, we gain nothing from knowing less.

There are many ways to combat this plight, and I can spend all day listing those out for you.  If I can be totally transparent and real about it, the best tool that I have witnessed comes from experiences and more often from bad experiences than good.  I am not trying to be pessimistic in the slightest, but to make abundantly clear that all bad experiences give perspective to what we proclaim as good and right.I could guess that with reflection, we all can look at something that went terribly wrong and find something that gained value or importance because of it.

That small aspect of the major problem is what I really want to explore today. I believe that in my 24 years alive, I have seen, heard, felt, and experienced enough to get a good feel of how the world spins. That belief right there is rooted in ignorance, even as I turn my head curiously to the side at what was just written above.  Without going on a full on “About Me” rant, I have lived in 6 different states,  visited half the country in some way or another, and have been close friends or conversed with citizens of at least 20 different countries.  That may be more or less than you but it gives me the semblance of experience that I hold true to myself in my current environment.  This is what fuels a certain cultural arrogance of feeling “well-traveled” while hiding an ignorance of calling a particular place where I am “from” and feeling comfort in doing so.

This all means a lot in the personality makeup of who I am.  I have suffered the loss of very important friendships, left in the middle of school years, gone from being a racial minority in some of my classes to the absolute majority in all of them, and knew no one in a foreign place. I have gone through all those experiences simultaneously multiple times but these experiences are exactly why I can do what I am doing now.  They have given me so much more in adaptability and insight than all the comfort and familiarity they took away.  Let me put that into perspective to give some more context.  I seek small yet significant impacts in friendships now because I know that those good memories and little mementos can be carried close without burdening me if I must part ways. Picking up and leaving in the middle of life itself multiple times allows me to respect time and its constraints, to recognize the mortality of a phase in life.  Though I was in no way treated less due to being a racial minority (whole different topic that I definitely will get into some other time), every tangible facet must be looked at differently when you go from the few to the many and vice versa. The isolation of knowing no one gave me the most important perspective of all: only knowing yourself allows you to understand who you actually are.

This is how I battle ignorance, I take these benefits from the difficult things I can remember and flip them on their heads.  This is the tip of the iceberg of what I have to say and only represents the first step of a very long journey. My blog, The Surreal Ordeal, is named after a phrase I came up with a very long time ago. It was always something I used off-hand as a clever username or an email handle, but I feel it is the only thing that makes sense to title this journey.  Life itself is The Surreal Ordeal and I can only hope to make that more clear to all of you.