Sometimes, I stop and think.  I’ve been getting some heat for being a ‘friendly’ ’social butterfly’ for a few months now, more often lately.  And after three decades of living in our society, it has been revealed to me that I have something all wrong.

Here’s the deal.  I like people.  I talk to everyone who talks to me first.  Sometimes, I initiate conversations, I don’t see myself as rude or obnoxious.   I saw a guy in the dentist’s office with a purse shaped like a fish and I hoped to talk to him.  I talk to EVERYONE: people on the street, peers, security guards, bikers, bums, governors.  That said, I genuinely, on some level, care about each and every person i talk to.  Apparently, that is socially unacceptable.  We had a joke in my family created by my dad, who talks to NO ONE.  He told me one time, “Becky, not everyone is your Goddamn friend!”.  really? Sidenote: I swear to this day he thinks I had a conversation at some point with the methheads that robbed us thinking I somehow got myself into that one. 

But anyway, this has become clear to me because of comments, actions, and an interview.

So I interviewed the guys I work with cuz we have loads of time to talk about things like this:

Me: When a girl is friendly and nice to you, do you take that to mean that she wants you?

Them: resounding ‘yes’

Me: That is Bullshit.  So a girl can’t be genuinely happy to see someone, happy to talk with them, touch base with them, if they don’t want to be anything more than a friend or acquiantance with them?

Them: No.

Me: Crap.  I’ve got it all backwards cuz I can’t say two words to someone I’m attracted to or want something from, but can talk at length to everyone else under the sun.  Where does that leave me?

Remy: That points to your fear of commitment and intimacy.  You’d rather have a million 15 minute relationships and not one deep relationship.  If you had a deep relationship, the 15 minute ones wouldn’t exist for you….

Me: (I checked out as his words became a blur of ‘commitment’, ‘intimacy’, ‘fear’. Just listening was a commitment.)

THen I talked to my mom about this phenonmenon. 

Me: Mom, this is news to me.  I think I’ve had it all wrong all along.  So, it is wrong for me to have friendly conversations with people I have no intention of wanting to sleep with or be with or anything like that?

Mom: Guys don’t want to be your friend.

Me: How can that be?  Everyone likes to have friends.

Mom: You are either extremely naive or extremely simple and I don’t think you are really that simple. The world just does not work that way.

Me: Well, it should.

Wow.  All these conversations I’ve been having with random people for all these years and now I see I’m a chickenhead or tramp.  I still think it’s all crazy talk.  Shit, I just value funny, nice people above almost everything else.  Can it possibly be that going out of your way to say ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ is revealing some sort of hidden agenda?

We are all f-ded up and act weird and I like every single one of ya for it.  But that doesn’t mean I want to have your babies.

K, we clear?

cool.

BB

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 5:15 pm and is filed under Random. 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.