You Can Pick Your Friends, but...

I admire John Mortimer's quote above--in theory. I also fear that society at large—in following this theory----would have to avoid me—not that I don’t recommend that anyway.

It can be wonderful thing to be chatting with someone, feeling them out, and finding out that they seem to agree with you on some core values—perhaps even just opinions or tastes. “Say,” you say to yourself--ideally not aloud--“this person could be a friend.”

{Digression: I feel even more dopey and juvenile than usual when I think of such a sentence, but it actually came to me few weeks ago. When you are a kid, you just have friends. They happen somehow and that’s it. You take them as a consistent fact, like The Muppet Show or macaroni and cheese. When you become an adult it becomes this rare thing to be appreciated and perhaps even moronically commented on in a blog}.

So I was saying that it’s a special event to come across someone who you feel comfortable with; who seems to understand your point of view. Then that person is labeled as One of Us—a good thing, to be sure. But then two things:
a. We may have fallen into the rut of gathering yet another person who agrees with Us up and down the line; a person who is not adding any spice to the dynamic. This can also be good, because strength in numbers certainly works on a social level. The more of Us there are, the less isolated we feel. But then if we are insulated within this Us, then we run the very likely risk of...ah the hell with it.
b. Or maybe we eventually see a fundamental difference with this person. According to our theory this should be a good thing. We should be seeking this out in people, but do we really want that or do we want to appear to want that? Or at least tell ourselves that we want that? I feel that this is a problem in Unitarian Universalism as well, but that’s a theme for another day.

Most of us are capable of damning another person in toto for a view we find particularly unfathomably ridiculous, if not utterly offensive. The question one has to answer, consciously or not, is whether it’s an issue worth fretting about, arguing to a hot degree, or even worth severing relations over. Is this person worth our time if they have this part of them that makes us uncomfortable, whether it’s that they hate anyone from Luxembourg or that they slurp their coffee? Does it become an equation where we balance their right-on attitude about azaleas against their truly insane pro-cockroach stance? Of course one may apply this—consciously or un---to issues less trivial, I just cite these vital areas of dispute to make a point.

I guess the answer is to avoid those who annoy and to embrace (not [necessarily] in the literal sense) those who don’t. Making math or chemistry out of it may be a waste of time.* An even bigger waste of time and emotional and philosophical energy would be worrying about why you are avoiding someone or do not like them. "Worrying" here is not the same as pondering. Looking at why you have decided something should be enlightening, but it should not produce guilt and self-loathing. If you don’t want to be around a swell guy because of his breath but for some reason are tolerant of a Luxembourger hater, you might want to think about it for future reference, but I wouldn’t recommend rocking in the corner over it.

Now that that is sorted out, maybe you can stop beating yourself up about why you avoid the likes of me, but remember to at least think about it as I sit silently cursing all of you for Not Getting It, Man.

*Yeah, it may be a wast of time. And Bill O'Reilly might be evil.