Warts—Curmudgeon Redux

Doing this kind of thing feels exposed. Yeah, I haven't attached my name to it so I am still sort of anonymous; but the small circle of friends who get it and read it know who I am and so I'm exposed to them anyway. It's not been without risk. One friend got kinda pissed at me about something I posted. That was not a happy moment for me either.

But here's the thing: without being in your face about it, I don't think this works unless I am at least truthful with the page, regardless of how that might make me look. And one does not have to be self-abegnative about it.

This year celebrates the twentieth with my spouse, though we haven't been married that long. That's about as long as I have been in a live with relationship with anyone. Funny that it doesn't feel like it has been that long. Sometimes it feels like just a very few years. It's whats in my currently available RAM and as a consequence tends to color my world,... a lot.

[In contrast some earlier relationships felt like they lasted a century when the reality was much different.]

My spouse makes friends. She makes lots of friends. She has gotten invited to a christening party by someone she met on a bus. Most of the people in our shared lives are people she made friends of.

I don't make friends. I have friends, but in each case it has taken some conscious effort to enable the relationship, either by me or the other. I'm just not an effusive connector. If I meet you once, I'll be lucky to remember your name even if I like you. More people know me than I know, and sometimes that's embarassing. I'm gotten pretty unashamed about saying, "Look, I'm sorry, but I don't remember who you are or where we met. Can you help me out?" When I have a place and a role to play, like a job where I work with lots of people, I'll remember names and things about the people.

I think she has more patience than me about people in general, which is really funny because of how often she doesn't seem to have much with me--patience that is.

I would like to think of myself as tolerant and generous and an all round good fellow; and I know I'm not. I have no patience for incompetence other than my own (funny thing about that), though I am actually a supportive and encouraging teacher and coach. In the crowd on the street I am full of (mostly negative) judgments. I talk to the television, angrily, especially about the fallacious PAC ads during campaign season, but also about the medication ads where the list of cautions and side effects takes half of the time to recite.

I'm not Eyore, but I'm pretty much a cynic about just about everything. I guess the way I figured the world was at a pretty early age, was that it was a kind of massive con job and threat, that if I wasn't on guard all of the time I was going to get taken advantage of, ripped off, cheated, etc. etc. Guess what? I got ripped off and cheated anyway. Vigilance may help but mostly I think it causes acid reflux.

So I'm a grump. I'm not an unpleasant mean grump. I can be taken out in polite company. Just don't expect me to be able to hold up for long when the room is full of people I don't know. And even among friends I can sometimes say some moody off-the-wall thing that probably puts people's teeth on edge. I'm sorry probably isn't good enough for that, and I am sorry. You'll never know how much and how embarassed I am. And it's no saving grace to be like the little girl with the curl if when you are bad you are horrid.

So it's pretty amazing to me that this woman loves me. Sometimes I don't believe it. It's a way of making things safer that actually doesn't work. There have been others. I didn't believe them either.

So maybe that's where this is leading me. I suspect that despite wanting to be liked myself, that I don't like others much until I get to know them (hard for me), and I really don't get that they like me much. I don't believe it. There's a connection there.