Why I Can't do This

Daily routines are impossible to keep up.

Take, for example, the ambitious undertaking that was to be these thoughts - a daily pining away at intelligence meant for your amusement. I'm hoping I'll be able to do a better job of it, despite human nature. The problem, as I see it, is that things outside of securing shelter, finding food and finding a social web are not high on the priority list for humans. Our brains do not function on a daily level toward tasks that might seem trivial in the evolutionary sense. Sending a daily email of musings takes a bit more effort than it seems.

In the same vein, I was thinking yesterday about communication. First, some things about me that you may already know:

1) I have a complex that doesn't allow to believe that my friends are actually my friends.

This was jarred into existence early on in my life when friends turned their backs on me. Middle school was the roughest period of time, having no friends and realizing that the ones I did have openly made fun of me. It's also tough considering that know one puts out a manual on how to be friends with people. We all sort of suck at it. I had a similar situation happen in high school - the summer after graduation actually - where a group of friends I had spent most of my senior year with, decided that I just didn't fit in with them. It was upsetting, but my analytical mind passed over the situation without any drama because I was heading to college in a month and would soon cut ties with them anyway.

2) This situation is coupled with the fact that I'm an initiator. I call people to hang out. I send the initial emails of conversation. I move relationships along. This is a hard spot to be in because there is rarely any sign from friends that you're advances are actually welcome. You begin to feel as if you're a pest. You think, "If they really wanted to hang out with me, wouldn't they call me up instead of always the other way around?"

Also, I tend to read deeply into the smallest of actions. I think that reading deeply is better than not, but the deeper you go, the more room for error there is. People have deep-seeded reasons for what they do, but guessing those motivations is sometimes difficult.

So my thought, even though this seems like rambling, is that technology has made us bad friends. People send a quick text or facebook message every so often and feel that's the basis for a solid friendship. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people don't return my calls or texts. There's pretty much no reason for it in this day and age to get back to someone within 24 hours of the initial contact. But we just don't. And I read a lot into that inaction.

There was a situation with my predecessor here where the phones got turned off because of delinquent payments. I couldn't understand how someone could let that happen. One of my coworkers told me, "It's just a situation where the bills came, she thought she'd get to them later, and she just never got around to it."

Daily routines are impossible to keep up.

Even the severity of her paycheck and job weren't enough to point out the need to compartmentalize life and complete daily tasks as they come up. Much in the same way, it was easy for me to not send you an email for several days last week. I just didn't do them. And it makes me wonder, how many other things in life should we be doing daily that we aren't?

It takes discipline, but we have it in us.