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Sesame Street Premier Anniversary

Martin Luther's Birthday (The Protestant Reformation Guy and a distant ancestor)

 

I’ve been thinking about why I get along with some people better than others, and I’ve started to realize that the people I like to hang out with are the ones who allow me to be who I am.

 

No, wait!  Where are you going?!  Yes, I know, I know, it’s been said before, by a great many elementary school teachers and motivational speakers.  But what I began to realize is that in this case it doesn’t refer to some sort war between the mysterious group of horrible people trying to keep your self-esteem low and the happy freethinking groovy people who understand you.  It has to do with personality, and it’s nothing you can really change.

 

Me, I get along best with people who can handle random thoughts and interjections, and don’t think too linearly or too literally.  I’m a person composed pretty much entirely of irrelevant tangents,* and the people I’m most comfortable with are the ones who are, in turn, comfortable with a lot of detours on the conversational road.  People who want to hold onto a straight thread don’t do well with me, and I imagine that I grate on them as much as they grate on me.

 

I also do best with people who have a lot of abstract thinking ability.  I myself have an obsessive-compulsive personality, so I can sympathize with people who don’t like things to get weird.  But at the same time, I have oddball flights of whimsy, and a lot of my thinking is layered in metaphor and analogy.  So I look for people who share a sort of bizarre, Far Side outlook on life.

 

It’s not that I don’t like people who don’t think like that.  But I think that, in direct defiance of the Opposites Attract theory, I don’t do as well with them, and they don’t do as well with me.  They get put off when I go off on my tangents, and when they get puzzled, that puts me off.  So we wind up clashing, and neither of us looks good.  It’s the same principle as putting the colors of ice blue and burgundy together.  Separately they’re beautiful colors, but put them together and they both look bad.

 

This doesn’t mean that I limit myself to being friends with people who are just like me.  I’m just analyzing why I get along better with some people than others.

 

I’m not sure where I’m going with any of this,** but I was thinking it through today, and that was what I came up with, and I thought I’d share my introspection with the world, because I’ve been thinking about it myself, and I know that everybody is fascinated with every nuance of what goes on in my head.  Even if it does clash with their own heads.

 

*Well, actually, I’d argue that it’s quite the opposite if you look at it from inside my head and that I find more relevance; I seem to find analogy and connection in places where nobody else does, and my memory seems to be better than the average one at dredging up loose trivia.  But given that nobody gets to see the six-degrees-to-turkey-and-bacon process that zaps my consciousness from, say, car commercials to witch doctors, it sure looks irrelevant.

 

**I realize that this is strictly forbidden in writing essays, but I always hated those classes anyway.

Speaking of Pirates

Behold!  I have filled up my notebook!  I gotta whip out the next one and get started, because at this point I've got everyone swashing and buckling to the best of cheeseball fun.  There's hangings, and daring escapes from hangings, and slaves, and kidnappings, and crazy princes and pirates and crossbow bolts that hit that body part that writers of bad fiction everywhere praise the gods for creating.*  Fun stuff.  But it does mean I'm even nuttier than usual.  Watch out when you try to talk to me.  I might start sputtering on about Important Plot Points and random narrative junk and how much I'm enjoying myself right now.  Take no notice.  I'll get over it in a little while, and go on to alien doctors treating sprained tentacles and surgically removing xenomorphs from people.  Not that this is an improvement.  But that's how I go.

*The part on your shoulder that has no vital organs and thus is a really good spot for a torso wound that isn't life-threatening but is serious enough.