TASK #34: People Person
“Hell is other people”. Jean-Paul Sartre
You know that old axiom: No man is an island? Unfortunately, it’s true. We exist in a densely packed society that by its very nature forces us to interact with other humans nearly all day, every day.
Are there loners? But even if they are doing it by choice they still have to go to the store or the post office or the pet shop to get mice that they feed to their boa constrictors that they keep in a cage next to their bed…
But that’s not me. I am right in the thick of it, interacting with all sorts of people all day long.
Just last night my wife and I met another couple at a restaurant for dinner. It was one of those old funky places–there were peanut shells on the floor and a bar full of old sots sipping bottom shelf whiskey and talking in raspy half-sentences.
He was a garage-door salesman who rides a bike fifty miles a day, knows everything there is to know about the fuel capacity of mid-size vehicles, and has the best mortgage, the smartest daughter, and asked me five times’ “What do you do again?”, and before I could answer he would meander off onto another topic that I didn’t care about…
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The wife and I and the other couple were sitting in a booth. My wife and the other wife, Charlotte, were old friends and ignored me and the other guy, a garage-door salesman who rides a bike fifty miles a day, knows everything there is to know about the fuel capacity of mid-size vehicles, and has the best mortgage, the smartest daughter, and asked me five times’ “What do you do again?”, and before I could answer he would meander off onto another topic that I didn’t care about…
So as he blathered away I thought about that mythical island that no man lives on…
I woke up this morning thinking about that jerk, and all the other unpleasant interactions that I had yesterday, including, but not limited to, the mechanic who tried to rip me off for a new muffler.
That led me to think–every interaction I had wasn’t all bad. After all, I got laid last night, and that is a pleasant human experience.
So I decided to write up a list of everyone I interacted with during the course of a week. And Christ, it is a long list. I made contact in one way or another with dozens of people. And it’s not like I’m in customer service or some other job that forces me to deal with other people–I’m not. But still–it was a LOT of people, ranging from family and co-workers–that’s obvious, but there was also the dry cleaning guy, the postman, the bastard mechanic I mentioned, the greasy fellow at the hamburger stand, the bartender, the woman who asked me for a cigarette, which wasn’t a come-on, which I thought it was–she just wanted a cigarette. I talked with a priest, my kid’s teacher; I told a homeless guy that I didn’t have any change; I talked with a guy at the car wash–not because I wanted to but he just started up a conversation because we were both standing outside waiting for our cars to come out; I spoke, by phone, with someone at the DMV, and with a pollster who caught me at home and wanted to know if I was a registered gun owner (I’m not).And there were a bunch of others…
The list was so long that it took me by surprise. So I decided to divide it up into 2 big columns: INTERACTIONS I LIKED, and INTERACTIONS I DIDN’T LIKE.
There were a lot I didn’t like…some I had to have, like work interactions, but there were a lot that I could have avoided. Which is what I am going to do, for my own sanity.
TASK
Open your notebook. Do what I did. Write down every interaction you have with another person for an entire week, then break them down–Ones you Like, and Ones you don’t Like; then keep the ones that you like, and keep the ones you have to have–and get rid of the rest.
Photos by Joe Doe