I accidentally ran into author and Youtube content creator John Green, and I have now faced my first interaction with a famous person. Actually, John Green ran into me because he walked into the store I work at.

I am not even the biggest John Green fan, but when I was typing his mother-in-law’s name in QuickBooks, my stomach dropped when I looked up and saw John Green with his wife and two children. I just stood for a few seconds in minor shock, walked quickly over to them and asked, “Are you John Green?” even though it was obviously John Green. We had a brief conversation about how I go to Samford and how he and his wife are from the Birmingham area and how his son was wearing a cool tie-dye shirt. After I ran to the back of the store, I ran outside with my boss’s daughter and got proof of the meeting with a selfie taken by John Green himself.

Although I am not obsessed with John Green as some are, there are still connections I have to him and his work that I did not think of quickly enough and wish I could have mentioned. I never expected him to walk into the store I work at, so the most substantial conversation of our brief encounter was about how he misses using his Snapchat account and how I always forget to use my own. I probably would have told him the details from his novel “Paper Towns” that I wish were in the movie, but I do not even remember what the details were to tell him and had no time to research what they may have been. If I wanted to attempt having an intellectual conversation with John Green, I would have told him about my interactive, dramatic "Reacting to the Past" assignment on the Second Crusade last semester. When I watched his Crash Course video on the crusades to help me fulfill my role as Louis VII, he skipped the entire Second Crusade because, as he stated in the video, it bores him. Though I knew this at the time but forgot in the moment, I could have told John Green that his father-in-law was my surgeon three years ago, but he does not really care about that. In the end, my lack of specific questions for him made me feel like I was meeting a stranger in that it was a relaxed, natural conversation rather than me pulling out my list of questions for John Green.

All of these conversation ideas that came into my mind made me realize the odd connection our world now has between people due to technology or the internet or mass media. I know so much about John Green to the point that I could ask him so many questions about his life, yet he knows nothing about me. If I actually imagine meeting someone whom I am a true fan of, all I can imagine is my apology for strangely knowing such a large amount of facts about him or her. I have not even read all of John Green’s novels or watched all his videos, yet I already knew he went to Indian Springs before he told me in person and have seen a video of John Green letting his son cook "slobber carrots and gross barbecue."

The dynamic between a famous person and his or her admirer is so bizarre because it involves two people, yet one is clueless. In a world where real, substantial communication seems to be absent often, we still maintain connections with people who know nothing about us. There is no conclusion to whatever I am writing about in this article, but it overwhelms me when I think about how much I know about strangers. These thoughts came out of a coincidental collision with John Green, for I did not go to a book signing or video conference to see him. I politely found him in his hometown where he thought he could be safe from the public recognition. I did not even get a picture at first. I was just having a conversation with an author and his kind family. (But in all seriousness, there is no way John Green can go anywhere and expect to not be recognized.)

If anything comes from all of my thoughts about how I know so much about celebrities, there is a little hope that the world still has some sense of good communication and a drive to learn about people.

And I witnessed John Green say that he is working on another book.