It seems to be traditional that after two or three days of consecutive blogging I simply dry up and have no ideas. Even the act of recording things that happen or occur to me during my day seems to be difficult. Why is that? Why is it not possible for me to carry on observing things that are, even in a tiny way, different to normality? Or perhaps it isn't that I'm not observing or thinking of things, perhaps it's that I can't generate humour out of them? Yes, I think that might be it. Two things happened to me today that I thought I could write about, but on closer consideration I can't figure out what it is that might be funny.
Surely there is something funny to be said about having to wait for a minute or two when a friend that you're walking along with sees a non-mutual friend of theirs and has a conversation that completely excludes you? This happened to me today. It's not very warm out at the moment, as I said yesterday, I was hungry, and I'd spent longer away from the office at lunch than I'd have liked, but on the way back to work I had to wait for about 3 minutes while my friend talked to an acquaintance of hers. This was rubbish, though through no fault of my friend - she couldn't simply ignore her friend, especially as the friend made a point of stopping and talking. But it left me at the mother of all loose ends. What should I do? I realised about ten seconds after their conversation started that if I was going to carry on back to work and leave my friend I'd have had to have made that clear pretty much straight-away with a polite "I've got to get back, but I'll see you later, yeah?" But by the time I realised that that was how I'd need to word it, the moment had passed. To do so after ten seconds would mean that I'd pondered the situation, even studied the embryonic conversation that was being formed in front of me, and thought "no, it's not worth staying for this". A much, much more polite and sympathetic response would have been an immediate indication that I couldn't wait, but a delay of 10 seconds meant that I'd stewed and given up on the fleeting lunch-relationship that my colleague and I had enjoyed for the previous 49 minutes. A departure after 10 seconds of this interloping conversation would have blown a hole in the fuselage of this lunch-date. A hole that would have highlighted that not only am I only with you at this point in time because it's lunch, but I'm only interested in having any interaction with you at all because during 9-5 I am forced to occupy the same building as you in order to earn a wage. This would have been an unfair reflection of my relationship with the person in question in any event - we genuinely get on well outside of work.
I've been told in the past that I'm a good listener. That's bollocks and I've only really just realised it. For a start, I can't think that I've ever heard that feedback from a man. So straight off that tells you that in many cases my attentiveness will bear some relationship to my libido. However, I seem to have more female friends than male, and it's certainly not the case that I want to 'bed' - to use the tabloid parlance - many of my female friends. In fact, I probably don't want to 'bed' any of my actual, genuine, friends. And let's leave female acquaintances out of this or it gets complected.
Anyway, my point is that I'm not a good listener - whether to females or males - I am simply quite good at finding something with which to agree on about their position and focusing on it. Or, alternatively, I am good at finding a positive in a situation and exploiting it to make it seem that the overall impression that the person I'm speaking to has is that 'everything is, or will be, alright'. I caught myself doing it automatically the other day. A friend (not you) started to tell me about an issue that he/she had in a work relationship the other day. Immediately I discovered that I was scouring his/her testimony for anything to alight upon as a positive or as a signal misinterpreted. I was simply looking for the most simple way of getting from A to B; from concerned / depressed / upset, to at ease / positive / happy. That is not being a good listening: at best it's prostituting my ability to rationalise interpersonal dilemmas in return for friendship, and at worst it's a technique to change the topic of conversation from something boring - other people's problems - to something interesting - my problems.
That's an exaggeration. In fact, it's perhaps even a distorted exaggeration. I think it's heavily influenced by the mood I was in when someone started talking to me about what I considered to be an unimportant issue today. It's unfair on that person, and indeed all my friends, that I've taken that issue as a test case for my response, and it's unfair on me to suggest that there aren't regular occasions when I genuinely do believe in the comforting advice that I'm giving.
But what is left is the reality that I run the risk of taking sides - albeit only privately in order to comfort someone - in a debate of which I have only one-sided knowledge. I absolutely abhor the idea of doing that in any other field of life, so why is it ok to do it in a friendship? Why do I suspend my critical faculties for that period of time when I'm reassuring a friend? Without wanting to come to a disgustingly soppy conclusion, I suppose that is the point of being a friend. Where I draw the line, however, is going public. Were I asked to voice an opinion publicly about an issue on which I'd find it impossible to remain silent, I'd need to look at all the evidence and be completely honest. Albeit I'd then try to spin my honesty in a way that would maximise the chance that I'd not lose the friendship I'd necessarily endangered with this honesty (I'm very good at silence and/or diplomacy so this situation has never come up, by the way). Does that make me a bad person? Perhaps. But if it does it's because I'm hypothetically willing to acknowledge the fallibility of my friends emotional responses, which seems to me to be a reasonable position to hypothetically take.
PEF
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