Comments | daisan: Biggest Regrets

daisan

Biggest Regrets

Sep 14, 2007 22:25

Dan's in Ann Arbor at the moment, downing beers at an old college hangout with a couple old college friends. He interrupted his good time to take my call and we had an amazing conversation considering I could barely hear him over the drunken girl loudly wailing to her friends about something or other ( Read more... )

well when you put it that way, friends

Comments 9

novemberhour September 15 2007, 15:31:11 UTC

Morals get a bad rap. That sounds ridiculous, but it's true. Integrity's less of a dirty word, for some reason, but I find they work interchangeably. I can only assume that if you regret sticking to your morals, they weren't really your morals in the first place? Anyway, you're not alone - I can't imagine regretting the times I failed to break my own honor code, rather than the times I did. And raising virtuous kids is a gift to the world - the opposite is a curse at worst, at best, no benefit at all.

daisan September 16 2007, 03:39:17 UTC

Yeah, they do get a bad rap. And "virtuous" sounds like a euphemism for "prude."

novemberhour September 16 2007, 12:45:12 UTC

Yes. As I've explained countless times, there's a difference between 'self control' and 'repression.'

daisan September 16 2007, 18:31:37 UTC

Word.

pink_aster September 15 2007, 23:39:12 UTC

Maybe they didn't mean it entirely literally. I'm too brain dead right now to elaborate, but I mean, I could see saying something similar, just meaning, "While my uber asshole boyfriend was cheating on me, I passed up dates with guys who were probably nicer because I was 'seeing someone'. Boy I wish I'd just gone out with those guys (ie - cheated on my cheating boyfriend, thus, abandoning my morals).

Of course, like you, I wasn't there.

I am with you, though, the things I regret are the times I was a jerk. Not the times I wasn't a jerk.

daisan September 16 2007, 03:40:31 UTC

I'm hoping they just weren't really thinking. Had I been there (I guess it's a good thing I wasn't) I probably would have leapt all over the comment and asked them to elaborate and give me examples, etc. I'm not so much fun to be around during topics like this.

Ah well.

evalie September 17 2007, 01:47:56 UTC

I am totally with you on this one. To be fair, I am thinking that your friend has the right of it and it was just a poorly worded comment. Especially if you had high regards for these individuals before, I would like to think that these individuals would still be worthy of that high regard.

daisan September 17 2007, 03:32:06 UTC

I'd like to think so.

You know them both, of course. One lives in NY, the other in Toledo.

the_30th_year September 17 2007, 22:53:59 UTC

Well, that answers that question. :)

I would tend to believe that it probably was just a poor turn of phrase. I know that I sometimes look back at my own college experience and wish that I had "cut loose" a little more. Whether it was morals or values or just plain fear, there are certainly things that I regret not doing, as well as things I did.

I definitely don't think that a single, secondhand comment should fundamentally alter what you know about these guys. It's all too easy to say things that are stupid (particularly when beer is involved)...it's what we actually do that I think is far more critical.