People Suck, Part 2 of 2

hey you silly shits! who's ready for part 2? there's got to be plenty more to add to this rant, right?

let's talk about the difference between an isolated incident and the emergence of a social trend after having several incidents happen in a row...

when one person fucks you over, you try your best to just blow it off. it's a completely different beast though when it happens to you over and over and you realize you can't just simply blow it off every time. that's when you have to try to narrow down what kind of people actually keep letting you down. often times i'll simply get frustrated and claim that people suck, much like i have in the title of this post. but it's not people that are doing this to me, it's the particular people that i've chose to grow closer to and become friends with.

i don't know exactly what age it happened at, but i would guess around something like 17 i started to prefer making friends with girls instead of guys. before that, i basically never had female friends, all my best friends growing up were guys no more than 9 months apart from my age. i had formed crushes on girls at an early age, even in kindergarten i would have some sort of warped romantic feeling for the prettier girls in class. but once the end of high school started to come around i seemed to have a bit more confidence in myself and didn't have too much trouble becoming friends with girls in classes and through jobs. i think when i entered college, this became even more apparent. even now at 21, i can't really explain why this happens.

i guess when i walk into an environment such as work or class for the first time, i employ just a real quick flash of knowledge to decide where i'd like to sit, because we all know where you sit the first time could easily be where you sit/claim for the rest of the semester. for some reason i seem to have less tolerance for sitting next to other guys, not too sure why. i think i'm more unhappy in a situation overall when i'm near a guy that i find somewhat pompous or just talks too much or something. so i typically try to sit closer to girls than guys. but then, for obvious human-aesthetic-fetish purposes, i'd prefer to sit closer to attractive girls than unattractive ones. so putting this all together, i'm typically exposed to or sitting near attractive girls, and if you have enough confidence and are a likable enough person, you shouldn't have trouble becoming friends with at least some of them. the thing is, throughout college most of the time i've had a girlfriend, so in a sense i shouldn't really be talking that much with girls i'm attracted to, right? it's typically just an easy way to piss off your girlfriend. but i never seem to let this stop me. i think there's a part of me that still wants to be crushed upon, or to excite a girl by flirting her up a bit. i think that's prolly what drives me the most to form friendships with pretty girls. if they're nice enough and at some point admit they think you're cute, you feel pretty fulfilled launching into a friendship with them.

my problem isn't "oh i can't find people in classes/environments that i have any connection with" or "i'm too lonely in my classes." it's that when you become friends in whatever you have together, whether it's your impossible calculus class or your internship, it's too difficult to carry the friendship outside of that application. i've found that talking to that person outside of your familiar common area is exceedingly difficult, mostly based on their discomfort. i think that's where i differ from a lot of people regarding who you actually consider your friends. in my opinion, just because you have a class with somebody and you sit next to each other everyday, you aren't really friends. look in the dictionary, a friend is somebody that you like and trust. just sitting next to somebody in class and occasionally talking to them about your subject isn't really a bonding friendship to me. you have to talk outside of that common area, you have to email, talk on the phone, get together for drinks, a meal, a movie, etc. friends will show up at my funeral, the guy that i sat next to in data structures freshmen year won't. why is it really all that difficult to get with people outside of your common area? and if it really is all that difficult, how did they ever end up hanging out with people in the first place?

unfortunately, in a male-female friendship, it's always gonna be tricky to keep things completely platonic and make sure things don't slip into the romantic realm, given that you're both already hitched or for some reason unable to date. so it's a little different than just being friends with another guy, you have to put extra effort into it just to make sure the girl doesn't get uncomfortable. the thing is, there are so many girls that can't get away from the traditional male-female relationship. the traditional male-female relationship is not friends, it's lovers. so there are so many girls that think the man always has to initiate contact, dictate the direction things head, etc. it seems to be next to impossible to get a girl out of this mode. the problem is, when they prove to be this way, they unknowingly make the entire friendship seem so much more like a date than just a meeting of 2 friends. and most of the time, if the girl already has a guy, she won't allow herself get into a one-on-one situation with you, for fear of something happening, or pissing off her boyfriend.

this is what really gets in the way. at about the ages of roughly 20-25, most people already have a boy/girlfriend, myself included. but we're all guilty of the same thing: we love our significant other enough so that we don't want to jeopardize what we have and keep things as happy as possible. well, that's great for the relationship and all, but it sort of destroys the rest of your social life, doesn't it? think about it, with that in mind, you start filtering all your friendships to disclude anybody you'd ever "accidentally" sleep with. girls have no problems becoming friends with girls, because they know their boyfriend's never gonna have to wonder whether they're being faithful or not when with them. apparently, very few people our age actually have any trust anymore. i think girls love to give themselves that kind of self-confidence: they love to make their boyfriend worry just a little bit, but then make him happy by fucking over the guy that was making them nervous. girls love to assume if the two of you (friends and only friends) go out and you have any second together alone at all, she's gonna end up being groped in the corner. often times, girls can't handle the fact that maybe, just maybe, you might just wanna have their company for a little bit, not that you're horny and you'd really sorta like to get laid tonight.

having attractive girls as friends is a complete double-edged sword. the pros: you can be seen in public with a variety of pretty girls that will make other guys jealous and make you look cooler, you know other girls that you'd happily date if something happened to your own relationship, and you have to worry less about her complaining about confidence and other issues because she's more confident in general due to her appearance. the cons: they frequently assume everyone wants to sleep with them and nothing else, they think they're doing you a favor just by spending any time with you, and they get away with a million things (such as excuses and rude remarks) that if a guy ever said to you, you'd have to be restrained from breaking his jaw.

the moral is: pretty girls will always be the best at duping you. i admit, i'm constantly duped by a pretty girl, and it will continue to happen. i'm powerless against it. girls give you hope and then they take it away. since they make anything seem like a date situation, if you get turned down, you feel like you're being rejected for a date. when a guy tells you he can't do something, you don't really care all that much.

so when promises go unfulfilled and calls and emails don't get returned, what's happens to you? you lose trust. you don't just lose trust in people you thought were your friends, you lose trust in everyone in general. you come to accept that even if you're getting together later or something will happen, you shouldn't get excited over it. nowadays when someone tries to set something up with me, i accept and all, but in the back of my mind, i'm telling myself "this probably won't happen." people wonder why i don't show that much emotion. do you think this could have something to do with it? i can't afford to build up my hopes for everything and then just to be rejected almost every single time. so after all this, you have me, a guy who doesn't trust people, is unwilling to meet new people that will just be like the rest that have disappointed him so far, and who generally feels he shouldn't tolerate anyone's bullshit because he's tolerated far too much already.

most people would disagree with me, but i put up with too much bullshit already. i really do. i think the automatic policy should be if you never contact me first, if you make me call you twice a week apart with no response, if you make up horrible excuses instead of actually just going out and having a good time, you should be crossed off my list. i think society in general should give up on that portion of society that's even capable of such acts. i say we all put our foot down and say fuck all those people and let them be friends amongst each other.

so how do you avoid people that will let you down? that's the problem, it's next to impossible. i wish i could have seen ahead and seen how so many of these "friends" would have treated me further down the line. at least in that case, i could have steered clear of them in the first place and just been friends with somebody else that wouldn't have let me down so much. i think from now on, when shaking someone's hand for the first time, i should say "hey, i'm justin... oh i'm sorry to bother you, but if i call you or send you an email will you be getting back to me within 2 days?" if they answer "uh prolly not" you find some polite way of telling them that you're terribly sorry but you can't waste your time dealing with their bullshit for now. if they answer "of course" you give 'em a nice big smile and pass 'em your contact info.

honestly, i hope in 5 years i'll never remember feeling this way. people in general make me sick. society lets me down everyday, and i can't continue to hide it.

sorry for the last couple days of extremely long posts, you'll just have to bear with me. this isn't the type of stuff i can explain in a few sentences.

best of luck,
justin