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[sildra]

I just got a wedding invitation from a friend from high school. How odd. Who would have thought that anyone who knew me back then would remember me at all, eleven years past graduation, let alone remember me fondly enough to invite me to their wedding. Even if this was one of my favorite people from high school

Comments

[sildra]

Well, first let's draw a distinction between superficial and shallow. Shallow people have no depth to them, but they don't necessarily have any particular prejudice against depth in themselves or others. Superficial people are people who care about--or intentionally come across as caring about--only superficial things, with regards to themselves and others.

Take... a certain mutual friend of ours, for example--you could talk to him for an hour and know everything there is to know about him, and spending a year with him would only add a couple trivial details. With him, what you see is what you get; he's shallow. But, he has no problem with other people having depth to them, and sometimes even takes an interest in that. And what obvious interests he does have he tends to be deeply interested/invested in. So, he's not superficial.

I also have a favorite example, from high school, of someone who was superficial but not shallow--she had all sorts of hidden depths. What she cared about was her appearance, and who she was dating, and his status, and she took pains to make sure she came across as a pretty, over-privileged, ditsy teenage girl. But if you somehow managed to scratch through that surface layer, underneath the ditz she was an almost-straight-A student in the honors program (although she played down the fact that she was an honors student, and, if asked about grades, tried to make it sound as if she was barely doing well enough to not be dropped into the regular track, and simultaneously that she didn't care about any of that). Underneath the dresses, makeup, and jewelry, she was pretty insecure about her family's financial situation since her father had died when she was in middle school. Underneath the catty teenage exterior she was actually really nice, and she cared deeply about her family and what very few real friends she had--and underneath even that, she'd intentionally done some truly awful things to people who hadn't really deserved it (the worst being that a kid got expelled in 10th grade due to her manipulations). All sorts of hidden depths, but in general you wouldn't have been allowed to see that, and that mostly was not what she cared about in other people either, because she was superficial.