neorants

For some reason, I always have a mind full of thoughts right when I wake up and right before I go to sleep. I swear, if I was at work for the 2 hours after I wake up and the 2 before I go to sleep, I would put people working 8 hour days to shame… silly office hour conventions.

Well, anyway, tonight I have a mind full of thoughts and nobody to speak them to so I’m typing them here as sort of a nightly mind dump. Kind of like a nightly dump of a filesystem to tape backup, only you dump stuff to tape to keep it around, while I’m dumping this here to get it out of my head so I can sleep.

I have this thing where I hate parting with people, at least those whose opinion I care about, on anything less than perfect terms. To be honest I think it stems from the whole “…do not let the sun go down while you are still angry…” biblical principle (Eph. 4:26), but in general if I feel any given exchange has gone badly, I tend to want to hash it out then and there, rather than give myself time to obsess over it and let it take hold in my mind. This tends to make me seem confrontational, and I guess, to a point, I can be. However, I’m also very quick to apologize when merited — I’ve even been faulted for saying “I’m sorry” too much — you know who you are. :p If I detect so much as an odd tone in how someone says something to me, I want to find out why then and there and get it taken care of.

I’m just very up front with people like that. I say what I think, when I think it. Ask anyone who knows me and they can probably tell you about some time when we were talking a while earlier and then I end up calling them on the cell phone afterwards to say that I’m sorry if I said something that hurt their feelings or just to clarify or build on something said earlier. You know, stuff that could wait until the next time we talk, but instead I’ve gotta get it out then and there. Ah, the joys of being a “sensitive guy.”

This “think it, say it” thing tends to place struggles to control what I say on an entirely different level, trying to control what I feel rather than what I say. So, someone hurts my feelings or ticks me off, and I get really quiet while I sit there and try to convince myself that the way I feel isn’t really the way I feel, twisting the situation around in my head like a rubik’s cube and trying to wrap my mind around just what’s going through it at that very moment. Twisted, eh? Consciously examining one’s own thought process is weird like that. It seems like most people just go around acting the way they act and don’t really bother thinking about why. Sometimes I envy them.

Still, I’ve noticed I respect people who say what’s on their mind a lot more than those who don’t. For instance, I deal with several people on a daily basis who I know have personal grudges against me, if they don’t outright dislike me. These people always play nice with me, even though I know how they really feel. I’d respect them a whole lot more if they came out in the open with it and we hashed it out so we could just move on with our lives, ya know? It’s just, you can’t walk up to someone and say “You hate me, don’t ya? Go ahead and say it, you’ll feel so much better,” without sounding like a paranoid lunatic. So the onus is on them. When I don’t like someone, I don’t work very hard to keep the secret. They know. Heck, there are plenty of people I really like who think I hate them because they can’t read my sarcasm, so just imagine how obvious I am with the ones I really dislike. ;)

Anyway, that’s my insight into my twisted little mind for the evening. I’m sure I’ll edit this later when I’m not so tired but for now, good night, and thanks for reading.