Many CHS students are familiar with the friendly face of Jeremy, who works at the Panera Cares in downtown Clayton. Jeremy is always cheerful and joking with CHS students. Recently, I interviewed him for a “Humans of Clayton” project inspired by “Humans of New York.”

I asked him, “Is there anything you want to do with your life in particular?”
His response was, “Well, one thing I want to do with my life….There are a lot of things i wanna do IN my life. Like I want to tour Europe and spend six months touring different European countries, then I wanna live in Spain. I want to tour the world, I want to have a family, I want to be a dad, I want to do lots of things IN my life. But WITH my life I want to become a child psychiatrist. I just want to listen to people. I don’t want to say ‘You should do this because I did that and it worked. You shouldn’t do this because that’s what the experts say…” I just want to listen. Everyone should have one person like that and not many people do. You can have 1000 friends on Facebook, but how many of them are actual friends to you? Not just people you know in real life, but who are your actual friends.”

This is something that everyone in our generation could keep in mind. When it comes to friendship and human relationships, sometimes you have to put down the phone, get off Facebook, and truly connect.