Above: Grace Cathedral, Topeka, Kansas.I really try not to use my blog as a place to bitch. But this afternoon I'm going to fail.
Lately I've been feeling low and having difficulty connecting with people. I'm feeling like an outcast for a natural reason, though I know it's not logical. I went to church this morning and was feeling really good afterwards. Then I tried to have brunch.
I'm going to jump back a little bit. A couple weeks ago I decided to have some guys over for drinks. It was last minute, but I'd done it before successfully. Of two dozen invitations, one guy (bless him) showed up, half said no, and half didn't respond.
I've spent most of the intervening time by myself. Finally, last night, I started to feel really lonely. Great, I thought, that means it's time to get back into the world.
This morning I invited five of my closets friends to brunch. One has a date, one has to clean his apartment, one declined without explanation, and two did not respond.
Fine. Whatever. I'm sure it was nothing personal. I send out as many of these invitations on a regular basis as anyone I know, so it shouldn't be surprising that many are declined. This post is not a passive-aggressive attempt to get anyone to change their behavior. I'm working hard on attempting less to impose my will on the world and accepting the choices of others. A sudden deluge of invitations would not fix my problem and would of necessity have their sincerity doubted. There's nothing that can or should be done.
But when do I start wondering whether the universe is trying to tell me something? Because this is making me mad and sad. And when I feel strongly about something, it has to have some underlying import, right?
When do I start wondering whether all these people are trying to tell me something? An old friend in Topeka used to ask me, when we hadn't seen each other for a while, whether his deodorant wasn't working. Somehow, with this crowd, I don't think that's the issue.
I realize the answer to those questions is in this post. It's almost certainly me, not anyone else. But if it's all much ado about nothing, why must it piss me off so much?
1 comment:
But lets be clear, once the cleaning of the apartment was complete, I did reach out to you. And reaching out has happened more recently. The only reason I didn't contact you about heading out this past Thursday was that you told me Tuesday that you were pretty set on staying in (as was everyone else on Thursday, it seems). I would go so far as to say that your decision to stay in on Thursday was the catalyst to everyone else taking the night off, since you were named in many people's justifications for not going out ("Well, Christian says he's not going out, so..."). How's that for your popularity?
It's easy to examine each piece of evidence close up and forget the full picture surrounding that. I wouldn't let a couple ill timed ideas define the rest of your relationships.
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