Pretentious, Self-Righteous Essays

From an entry made on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 in a previous blog:

“I wonder who remembers me. I consider all the things I’ve said, all the actions I’ve taken, words I’ve typed, notes I’ve sung.  To whom is this memorable?  To me?  To anyone else?  To the people to whom these actions were directed?  I should hope so.  But I don’t know.“

In 1.5 hours, it will be the two-year anniversary of this post.  It is an excerpt from an entry from an old, private, discontinued blog of mine that nearly none of you have or ever will see. But neither of these facts are important.  My feelings aren’t cyclic with an annual or biannual period.  Neither are they recurrent in any even seemingly ordered fashion.   Perhaps a lot of my feelings will reside entirely in the past.  Anyway. I wrote this entry at a time when I felt cynically about people, and the friendships that I’d made.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with old friends and colleagues as of late.  These words have trickled their way into my thoughts, resonating in the back of my mind all week.  To whom is this memorable? To me? To the people to whom [the things I've said, words I've typed] were directed?

It’s taken me two years minus 1.5 hours to be able to answer with certainty.  To both of us.

It should always be seen as tragic when good advice falls on deaf ears.   But it happens so often that we expect it to.  We expect to have no influence on others.  We expect others to not heed our advice.  We expect the least from each other, and it brings out the least in us.

Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I still always give my two cents.  Or maybe it’s my self-righteous desire to be in a position to say “I told you so”.  Maybe both – it can be hard to tell.  Irrespective of the reason, it’s a fruitful practice.   You can never regret thinking up your opinion then sharing it.  It’s the most honest and generous thing one can do.  I potentially effect positive change.  It’s valuable at/for every level and type of relationship: friend, boyfriend, work.  We only do a disservice to the people around us when we deprive them of useful feedback.  That’s what it is – useful feedback.

As of late, I’ve been bluntly honest with a lot of people around me.  This is partly because it’s really difficult to tolerate nonsense when you have no spare time, but I’ll admit that so much of it is because I get a sadistic pleasure out of being brutally honest to the point of being downright cruel.  Well, this plus all of the reasons mentioned above.  Maybe I’m not a “nice” person, but at least there’s some service I do for the recipient of my power trips. *Maybe*