Listening to the radio, driving, taking a shower, lying in bed moments before sleep, chatting with any anonymous person about anything pertinent to life. The key to this very unordered list is the category “places where ideas can strike you.”

I chatted briefly with a woman who sets up and maintains greeting card displays for a living. I was looking for a card and she happened to be there straightening up the displays after inventory, so I hunted while she straightened. We talked about people’s varying tastes and how one card that might be hilariously funny to some people could be ultimately offense to some wimps somewhere. Well, that was my take on it, I won’t put words in her mouth.

My conversation with the card lady, who I’m choosing just now to call Maureen, ended when I found my cards and she finished her work but not before we stumbled onto a good idea for a website/social network. There’s little likelihood I’ll ever build it or even think much about it after today or this week, but something about an idea getting tossed around between two people who know basically nothing about each other interests me.

As a constant idea tosser, I spend a good part of every day cooking up grand (and not so grand) schemes for everything from a shorter route to work by bicycle to pondering what little I understand of the world’s distribution of power and wealth. Whether alone or with a Maureen, ideas come along at very strange times. As long as the ideator keeps her or his mind open to new concepts and/or complete abandonments of old ones, the possibilities are endless for what you might stumble into conceptually.

Having the thought, owning the thought, and executing on the thought are of course three very different things. For me, most thoughts (probably rightfully) end shortly after they start with no harm done to anyone aside from the lost brain cells others incur when I can’t keep them to myself. However, there have been several that have really stuck with me. A few of which I am executing on, the world be wary.

I suppose now that I’m reaching the end of my appetite for writing that I didn’t really have much of a point, except to mention what I’m sure many others have noted: ideas come along in unexpected circumstances. Maureen, wherever you are now, whatever cards you are arranging, the world (or at least archive.org and Google’s cache) will remember we talked. *Sniff*