Curiosity

[lyricae]

As many of you know, I'm in the middle of my second quarter attending college. If this experience has taught me one thing, it's that how I see myself and how others see me is very very different. So now I'm curious :-) If there's anything that you have been wanting to say to me, or anything about me that you've been wondering I invite you now to

Comments

[wrog]

how I see myself and how others see me is very very different
I see myself as the most important person in the world.
And I would be very surprised if anyone else were to see me this same way.
Q.E.D.
There is a group of people here in town that I consider to be very good friends. She and I were talking about this and about a couple of incidents that had happened with this group that made me feel very isolated and somewhat alone. She told me that most of the people in the group considered me to be an acquaintance at best and that likely none of them realised that they were my only social circle and my only friends. The difference in viewpoint really staggered me.
I've found it takes me a very long time to actually get to know people.

I've also found that the word "friend" is endlessly malleable; really there's a whole mess of concepts getting conflated there.

• There are people whom I feel comfortable picking up the phone and calling.
• There are people I enjoy hanging out with, who I'd invite to parties and whose parties I'm more inclined to go to than not.
• There are people I would loan money to.
• There are people I would trust with the root password to my server.
• There are people I would trust with other things.
• There are people I would ask for various favors and people I would do favors for.
• There are people I would make some effort to stay in touch with if they moved away,
• There are people I would make some effort to visit if I knew I were going to be showing up in the town where they live and my schedule had sufficient slack -- for some folks I make sure the schedule has sufficient slack

These sets are all distinct and their membership varies with time.

So much depends on context. And sometimes my various decisions surprise me -- they don't always make sense, even in retrospect.

One summer, somebody I'd known for a number of years wanted to borrow $1000 so he could buy a car; there was pretty much no question he'd be able to pay it back, but I refused anyway. Seemed like a bad idea but I couldn't articulate any actual reason; just a gut feeling. The following summer I ended up giving roughly the same amount of money to a random homeless person who accosted me in the Barnes&Noble in downtown Bellevue. Seemed like the Right Thing. Maybe he was scam artist; I'll never know.

That all said, I'm pretty sure I have some rather close friends. I may not be entirely correct about who they are at any given time, but I'm pretty sure they're out there.

It's one of these Schroedinger concepts -- you can't actually know for sure until you do the experiment and make the observation, but the very act of doing the experiment will change the system out from under you. Sometimes it's better to just leave things in the superposition, cat-both-dead-and-alive-at-the-same-time state.

In any case, I never make lists.

Well okay, I had to make a list once; weddings sort of require it -- it was a rather large list, quite a bit larger than I was originally expecting it to be. To be fair, some of this was "gee, wouldn't it be cool to get so-and-so and so-and-so in the same room together, just to watch the fireworks?" To this day, I have no idea who was surprised to find themselves on The List and who was surprised not to. I think they all had a good time, but that whole day was kindof a blur anyway, so if there were fireworks I ended up missing them after all. And that was 9 years ago and I don't expect to ever have to do that again.

I don't know how much of this derives from my experiences in 1st grade (getting declared persona non grata by all of the kids who'd happily invited me to their birthday parties when I was in kindergarten) or later on (wash, rinse, repeat). I suppose once you get surprised often enough, you stop setting yourself up for it.

Shit happens. It'll do your blood pressure a world of good if you don't try to read too much into it. And anyway, it's not like you're ever going to get to see more than about 1/10 of the iceberg anyway...