How You Say
I have a lot of pieces of things that I still need to organize into coherent posts. Until then, something different.
I have long found it humorous to say patently absurd things completely deadpan. I have often suspected that people who do not know me must think that I am either incredibly stupid or mean, depending on the comment in question. Until recently, this never bothered me.
Lately, I’ve been having reservations. Once, at work, after one of my blatantly counter-productive “suggestions”, I received a detailed explanation as to why we do not do things that way. (I do not even remember the circumstances actually, just that the guy ought to have simply said, “That would be blatantly counter-productive,” so we could all move on.) That is not so bad really. What troubles me more is when I get home from some gathering and I get a phone call from someone who wants to discuss the “hurtful things” that I said. That’s a more serious problem.
Of course, sometimes I’m not joking at all. Lately, I feel as though every time I send an email and I’m thinking about it later, I feel like I need to send another email apologizing and explaining what I really meant. I rarely actually do though.
In my last post, I mentioned looking like a fool. I used that term because it happens to be my favorite word for describing myself, but when I wrote that, I knew it was wrong. It took a couple of days to come up with the word that really says what I intended: “scoundrel.”
These are but a few of the many cases when I am reminded that I am really just an insensitive jerk. And I do not believe that realizing after the fact that I had been unkind makes things any better. Particularly since I never apologize. I think that on some level, I merely feel, “Oh well. Maybe it will work out better the next time I have friends.”
On a loosely related note, while surfing the internet today, I happened to find a website dedicated to listing particularly stupid arguments that Christians have posted in various online forums and web pages. Some quotes made me think, “This obviously wasn’t really written by a Christian, this was written by someone satirizing Christians… right? Please?” Most just make you want to put your head down and cry.
Now, I think we all know that a lot of people say a lot of preposterous things online, so maybe this is nothing to get upset over. But the thing is, I too have a website, and the idea that someone might be reading this over and then going back to a site like that and declaring, “Hey, check out what this idiot said about God!” is extremely unsettling.
So… upon reflection, I feel that I inadvertently suggested that I care more about the opinions of some random internet atheist types than those of the people around me. But I like that, because I think it actually validates everything that I was trying to say anyway.