Sticks and Stars

What I really, really want to blog about is the intense frustration I’m experiencing when attempting to work with the guy who replaced me in my old position, but I can’t because a) I’m sure that you don’t give a shit, and b) if you do, by chance, give some small amount of shit, you certainly don’t give a shit about his and my arguments about referential data integrity and the finer points of SQL query structure. Let’s just suffice it to say that if you are looking at data for a group of 200 people, and you want to know how many of them have, say, brown eyes, it’s not acceptable to get 964 as a result. Does it not seem entirely clear that saying, “Out of 200 people, 964 of them have brown eyes,” just doesn’t make sense?!? Am I the only one who understands that you can’t have more brown eyed people than you have actual people?!?!?! The problem comes when I point this out to him and he shrugs and says, “Well, that’s what I get,” as if, well, sure, it makes no sense, but it’s what my peak-of-perfection query returned so it must be right.

So anyway, what I will write about instead is my new ploy to make friends. As I believe I’ve said before, I am a lonely girl. And what’s even worse (and presumably much of the reason for my loneliness), I am a shy, introverted, insecure girl who sometimes convinces myself that no one would ever want to be my friend for many varied reasons depending on the day and my mood and what I hate about myself at that particular moment. So despite the fact that I want to make friends, I find it really, really difficult to actually do so (and so much easier to just feel sorry for my lonely self instead).

Inspiring to me is a friend who is amazingly socially inept, but who, after his wife divorced him, decided to make friends. He saw a therapist and she gave him instructions to follow in order to take a step-by-step approach to becoming more socially comfortable and he did it and the last time I hung out with him I was amazed at how relaxed he was, and even better, how friendly and nice he seemed instead of his previous silent-and-grumpy self (which was really just shy-and-awkward in disguise). This morning in the shower I was feeling sorry for myself and wishing that I could find a therapist who could help me become more socially comfortable and make friends and then I started thinking about the steps he went through and whether I could do them myself and I realized, surprise surprise, that I could.

Part of my problem (outside of the shyness, insecurity, yada yada yada) is that I kind of have too high of standards when it comes to making friends. Not that I think I’m too good for people (well…not exactly anyway), it’s more that I have this idea that I shouldn’t bother to make friends with anyone who isn’t my ideal dream BFF because well, what’s the point, right? So then I bitch to myself about how there’s no one to be friends with because I never meet any queer, fat, politically radical, single women who are parenting small children and who else could I possibly be friends with?!? It’s very important that one’s friends be as close to a clone of oneself as possible, no?

Also in the shower this morning, I realized that this notion might be a bit, shall we say, silly.

So then I started thinking about the friend-making opportunities that stare me in the face every day and imagined myself actually making the best of them and what that might look like. Small steps is the key.

1) There’s a woman at my bus stop every morning who appears to be roughly my age. We smile at each other and say hi and wish each other a good day, but that’s it. I could introduce myself to her and make further small talk. (I imagined doing so this morning and almost did it except that while it’s usually just her and I at the bus stop, this morning there was an odd parade of about fifteen other random people and that just threw everything off).

2) There’s this woman I work with who has an open house at her house every month and I always mean to go but never do. I could actually go, which would be the first step toward bumping her and my work friendship to something that extended outside the boundaries at work.

3) There’s a (single) woman I work with who recently adopted a toddler and whenever I hear anyone ask how things are going, her response of, “Good! Everything is good!” sounds to me a lot like, “Oh my fucking god what the hell was I thinking?!?!” I’ve been thinking for weeks that I should ask her to have lunch with me so she can really talk about parenting because I know that for me, being able to talk about the hellishness that can be parenting, and parenting solo in particular, is kind of key to being able to ever look adoringly at my little beasts.

I must say that each opportunity I list above feels terrifying and vomit-inspiring. The last one in particular makes me feel faint even, until I remember that this is just a blog entry and I don’t actually have to do it. Hell, I can even tell you all lies about how I did do it and it went off without a hitch because while I feel intensely socially awkward, the reality is that I am this amazingly charismatic individual who draws people to her in an almost unnaturally magnetic manner.

But lying about it on my blog does not actually result in any friends, so that’s probably not the path I’ll take.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.