What makes a friend?

“I’m going to assume that having close friend(s) is an important goal to you, just as I think it is important to many other people. With that assumption, I have 2 related questions - what qualities are you looking for in a close friend, and how can you find people with those qualities so that you can have a meaningful, close relationship?”
-Daisy

The short answer:

She should make me feel comfortable. More later.

The long answer:

As you may recall, I am not really a friendly person. Even though I feel like I would make a really good friend, I have thus far been unable to make a really good friend. Perhaps it’s because my standards are too high, or because I haven’t talked to enough people, or because robotics has yet to advance to a sufficient degree. But maybe if I explain what kind of person I’m looking for, they’ll flock here like in Field of Dreams. (I hope they’ll be living.)

Once I was lamenting to a friend of mine that there are a bunch of people that were once my friends but to whom I never talk anymore, and really, I had no such desire. To me, these people were no longer my friends, and really wasn’t this inevitable? “You know what they say about old soldiers?” I said. “Well, I guess that’s true about friendships, too.” But she demurred, saying that she thought that friendships were about making a connection with another person that would never go away. Even if two friends grow apart over the years, give them a bit of time together and they’ll be able to reconnect as always. It was a sweet philosophy, and she eventually became the closest friend I’ve ever had. Of course, we’re no longer friends. I guess I showed her.

I still believe that friendships are like old soldiers because I’ve had no evidence to the contrary, but how I’d wish to be proven wrong. And so if I were to ever have a really close friend, they would have to do just that, prove me wrong. I’ll believe it once I experience it for myself.

Since that wasn’t very helpful, I’ll be a little more specific about what I’m looking for in a close friend. First, the superficies. Though gender is not that important since the relationship will be platonic anyway, I’d prefer female to male, if only because I tend to get uncomfortable talking about feelings and such with guys. She should be reasonably fit and roughly my age (since I am both reasonably fit and roughly my age). Finally, it’s not that important, but in all honesty I guess I’d prefer her to be pretty, if only because being seen with attractive people makes me seem cooler.

That’s still a fairly large pool, so I’ll have to whittle it down some more. She has to be smart. I’m not asking for a genius, but if I’m going to be talking to her a lot, I’d be lost at sea if she didn’t understand dry humor, and preferably her bon mots would not bomb either. Intelligence in terms of knowledge is less important than a sharp wit, but obviously it wouldn’t hurt.

She should speak in a fairly down-to-earth manner. That’s sort of vague, but I just mean that she should be able to hold a casual conversation. Sometimes you run across people who try to appear smarter than you at every opportunity, and frankly, there are enough people like me in the world. She should also be good at nonsensical banter. While I’m not a fan of small talk, I can talk forever about a lot of random things, and I’d like someone who would enjoy my inane ramblings and entertain me with her own. Along this vein, she should be a fun person, much like I am not. There are some things that I pretend not to like but into which I would actually like to be dragged, so she should be willing to do the dragging. However, she should also be able to tell when I am not willing to be dragged. In other words, she should be psychic.

We have to have good conversations. I am a terrible conversationalist most of the time, but I think that given the right person, I could talk for hours and not even realize it. She should know when to be serious and when to be silly. She should be a good listener, in that she should really pay attention to what I’m saying as well as what I’m not saying. She doesn’t have to be the most open person in the world, but she should be straightforward and honest. She should have the courage to press me sometimes, because I have the tendency to leave things unsaid that I really want to say. She should not be afraid of an argument, and she should realize that I prefer clarity over tact. She should be able to compromise, but she should admit when she is wrong and tell me when I am wrong. She should be there when I need her and know that I’d do the same for her. She shouldn’t be put off by my idiosyncrasies, nor I by hers. And seeing as how I’m so questionable, she shouldn’t be afraid to ask anything instead of ignoring or assuming.

She should like my scrambled eggs. She should be sometimes lazy, sometimes energetic. She should love Seinfeld and The Office. She should be a good singer, musician, artist, or writer. She should have neat handwriting. She should smile when I least expect it. She should be sweet but a little sassy. She should be willing to gamble sometimes. She should have a life. Her favorite color should not be pink. She should take pleasure in subtlety but know when to be blunt. She should not try too hard but try hard enough. She should trust me. She should prefer creamy peanut butter. She should be modest, kind, playful, resilient, respectful, and respectable. In short, she should be perfect. I hope that narrows it down enough.

Actually, those are just guidelines. All that really matters is that I should feel comfortable being and talking with her, like I do not everyone else in the world. More on the second question later.

Cheers,
-qm

 

What’s your favorite season?

The short answer:

Winter.

The long answer:

Of all the questions that people ask me, my least favorite to answer are those of the form, “What’s your favorite ______?” (Runners-up include “How are you?” and any question preceded by the phrase, “Tell me the truth.”) The reason is that I just don’t have a lot of favorite things. How am I supposed to pick out of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen the one that I think is better than all the others? Inevitably I just pick a random movie that I sort of liked, and then my interrogator will say, “Oh, I love that movie!” while secretly formulating a scathing critique of my artistic tastes and personality. Sometimes I’m tempted to say Legally Blonde just to see what happens.

When you’re in elementary school especially, I feel that they ask about your favorite things a lot. I don’t really see the point, since every kid’s favorite food is pizza, favorite class is recess, and favorite subatomic particle is the W^- boson. I’m not sure what one’s supposed to infer from this, except that kids like to eat salty foods, they like running around, and they apparently have a precocious understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics.

Likewise, every kid’s favorite season is summer because there’s no school, and for years, so has it been my favorite season. But now that I’m old enough that I’m expected to do work during the summer, I decided that perhaps it’s time to reevaluate my stance. Luckily, there are only four seasons, so this shouldn’t take very long.

A lot of people like summer, but I’ve started to become annoyed with it. Sure, the weather is nice, but so what? I don’t like being sweaty, and I don’t really see the appeal of sitting around on a beach. I’ve still not gotten used to being hot all the time, and the temperature doesn’t help. And even though summer has a lot of fans, it doesn’t have enough. Sure, some places have air conditioning, but I’d rather it needn’t be conditioned in the first place.

That’s why I’ve strayed away from summer and come to like winter. Even when I was a kid, it was my second favorite season. Part of this was because there was a winter break and there are a lot of good holidays in winter, but it had a lot of intrinsic value also. Sure, some people don’t like the cold, but give me a warm blanket and a cup of cocoa and I’m happy. I also love snow. I was never the type to build snowmen or make snow angels or have huge snowball fights; I was the type that could just sit by the window and watch it accumulate for hours. While some kids tromped through fresh snow, I never had the heart to ruin it… it’s just so white and peaceful and nice…. Also snow days were awesome.

Strangely, I also like winter because it can be so horrible. There are days that are so cold, wet, and miserable that you don’t even want to set foot outside. Everybody you run into is in a bad mood, and nobody asks you about your favorite anything. This sounds terrible, but it makes me feel better knowing that nobody is happy all the time. When you’re feeling depressed or mean in the summer, people have the tendency to think you’re somehow bad at living, but in the winter, you’re basically normal by comparison. Even if I’m feeling bad for some other reason, I can pretend that it’s because of the weather and nobody will feel the need to bother me about it. Life isn’t always sunny, and the weather shouldn’t be either. (This is also why I can never live in California.)

Autumn is okay I guess, but I can’t say I fall for it. (Pun!) It’s nice and cool and the trees are pretty, but there’s not much else to say about it. I don’t really like spring, but that’s because I don’t care for watching trees and flowers bloom, so I spend most of my time wishing it’d be summer already—or even better, winter, but that’s not how things tend to progress.

In summary, winter is the winner. (That wasn’t very summery at all.)

Cheers,
-qm

 

Are you friendly?

The short answer:

I guess not.

The long answer:

When I was in high school, I had a friend who lived across the street from me. I say that he was a friend because we had hung out with the same group of people since when we were little, but not because I particularly liked his personality or his interests or his appearance or his demeanor or his clothes or his existence. Nevertheless, we were pretty good friends, and we would often walk together to and from the bus stop.

One day near the end of our senior year of high school, some of us received letters from our homeroom teachers that we had written to ourselves at the beginning of middle school. I never wrote such a letter, but the idea was that you included things in which your future self might be interested, such as your hopes, your dreams, your desires, and in some particularly insightful cases, cash. Then years later, you could marvel at how much your life had changed and how much the dollar had depreciated.

My friend happened to receive such a letter from himself, and we talked about it on the way back from the bus stop that day. In it, he had spent a little time talking about who his friends were, and at one point he wrote that he had this really smart friend who lived across the street. I was prepared to act flattered, but then he added that he had written afterwards, “God, I hate [QM].” Then there was an awkward silence. I didn’t exactly know what to say, and why did he feel compelled to tell me that? In any case, we were just about home, so that was that. I took solace in the fact that I didn’t really like anything about him anyway.

Sometimes I think I don’t really know what a friend is. I know plenty of people whom I would casually call friends, but are they really my friends? Most such people I only know on a very superficial level. I spent a lot of time in high school hanging out with my so-called friends, but now that I think about it, I really didn’t like many of them at all.

In some ways, having friends has always just been one big formality for me. The problem is that when you’re little, you don’t really get to choose your friends. Your friends are the people in your class or the people who live close to you. As you get older, it becomes less restrictive, but really, even in high school there’s still not that much choice about it. Sometimes it just seems like a pointless ritual that I don’t really understand.

This does not mean that I don’t want or need friends. It’s nice to have friends, especially when you’re strapped for cash or you need a ride to the airport, and I guess the socializing is okay, too, sometimes. And I would love to have a really close friend—a “best friend,” if you will—but I have no idea how one acquires such a thing. (As you may recall, I’m not exactly skilled at dealing with other people.) I’m not even sure how one qualifies as a best friend—I think ice cream and slumber parties are somehow involved—but I am pretty sure that I have not had one, nor have I ever been one for anyone else. The fact is that I have just not had that many friends in my life, and none of them have I known or have known me well enough to qualify as a best friend.

Sometimes I think that it’s a real shame, that people don’t know what they’re missing out on. Objectively, I think that I have a lot of qualities that generally make for a good friend. I’m loyal, aggreable, and unassuming. I can be serious or playful, honest or sarcastic, and insightful or inane as fits the situation. (Also, I’m good at keeping secrets, because who would I tell?) However, I’m pretty sure that I don’t come off as such, and that to most people I just seem sort of quiet and aloof, which is not really the best way to attract friends. Another problem is that I don’t like a lot of people; it’s not that I dislike them, it’s just that I don’t like them. As a result, it’s hard for me to find someone that I like enough to express myself. Perhaps I’m just destined not to befriend or be friendly.

There has been one person that I would almost say could have been my best friend, but I don’t think we’re friends anymore. But since that story tends to get me sort of depressed, maybe I’ll save it for when I’m in a friendlier mood.

Cheers,
-qm

 

Is it time for a change?

The short answer:

Probably, but I’m not sure how.

The long answer:

I do not like carrying change around with me. Instead, it just accumulates in my desk drawers or on my dresser or on any other flat surface I can find. Somehow my home has managed not to overflow with coins yet. I think they must evaporate or something.

Change is basically worthless to me, simply because I don’t spend it on anything except laundry. I had a roommate in college who also never spent any change. His excuse was that he was from Europe, and he never bothered to learn the denominations of our coins. Sadly, I have no such excuse, I’m just lazy. If I’m buying something, I don’t want to spend the time or brainpower to count out coins from my pocket. The fact is that change just takes more effort than I’m willing to exert at any given time.

Alas, the same is often true for me when it comes to change, the abstract kind. It is much easier to do things in the same way that I have always done them than to do them differently. As a result, I generally don’t feel like putting in the effort to change. But lately, I’ve been thinking that I should change.

Part of the reason is that it sounds horrible if you say that you don’t like to change. People just assume that you’re an obstinate jerk. Of course, this is sort of hypocritical. Everybody says that they are all for change, but no one thinks about how they perform the same routine day after day, week after week. Somehow, we say that we should always strive for change, while at the same time we try to be consistent and honor traditions. Humans, whether we be nuns or not, are creatures of habit, and one of our habits is saying that we should change without actually doing anything about it.

I have always tried my best to be consistent, perhaps almost to a fault. As you may recall, I have a number of strange habits, and sometimes I feel that many of them I perform just to be consistent with my past self. After all, surely Past Me had a reason to make certain decisions, and if I go back on those decisions, am I not being untrue to myself? However, Present Me sometimes fails to realize that Past Me leaves all important decisions to Future Me, so that really Past Me is not to be trusted at all. (Luckily, Past Me, Present Me, and Future Me never meet; that would be impossibly tense.)

Sometimes I ask myself, where has being consistent ever gotten me, and the answer is obvious: the same place I started. I don’t need a lot of chaos in my life, so this is fine most of the time. I am perfectly happy to sit around on a lazy Saturday like today in my pajamas. But then I wonder, what am I missing out on? It would be terrible if the world was passing me by, just because I don’t feel like changing. Then I think, well then I should change, but unfortunately that doesn’t exactly tell me how. If only it were as easy as putting on pants.

Saying that you should change without doing anything about it is like having change build up in your house: it doesn’t do you any good unless you use it. Unfortunately, you can’t use change unless you decide on something on which to spend it, and that’s the decision that I need to take some time to figure out. At least I finally got around to changing my blog’s template. It’s nice to see a little color for a change.

Cheers,
-qm

 

Is it still worth it?

The short answer:

Perhaps, even if it doesn’t seem so.

The long answer:

When I was in kindergarten, I had a habit of losing my mittens. I didn’t think that losing a mitten was a big deal, but then again, I wasn’t the one who had to keep buying them. To stop this, my mother started attaching them to the sleeves of my winter coat with safety pins. (Alas, this only seemed to increase the chances of me losing my coat.) Eventually, though, I felt that I was old enough to graduate myself from mitten school, and so my last two years of college were spent pin-free.

But two days ago, I was out for a late bicycle ride, and somewhere along the way one of my black gloves fell out of my coat pocket. By the time I discovered this, it was already getting dark, and while I retraced my route in hopes of spotting it, I was unsuccessful. Oh well, I thought, at least some one-handed hobo will be happy, that is, unless he’s left-handed.

Back at home, I was prepared to move on with my life, but as I tossed my remaining glove onto the table, I felt unsettled. There is something oddly depressing about a glove whose mate has gone missing. It is not the same as when a sock goes missing. If one day you are folding laundry and there are an odd number of socks, there is an easy solution: keep putting the socks back in the dryer until it eats another one. (Either that or find a friendly pirate hobo.)

But it’s different with a glove. People do not own a multitude of gloves—and rarely two identical sets—and they can also be somewhat difficult and expensive to replace. Here I had a lone glove, and what was I to do with it? Common sense might tell me to throw it out, because a single glove is pretty useless. But this seemed unfair. This glove was just as wearable as it was the day before, and yet it was about to be cast aside simply because its mate was gone. Somehow, in just an instant, it had become worthless through no fault of its own—curse you, gravity!—and I seemed to have no choice but to get rid of it.

And so I wondered, is worth really so fragile? If this glove can go from a necessary (and waterproof) accessory to a useless wad of fabric just because I was a little careless, who’s to say that any of us is safe? Certainly I would like to believe that my work is worth enough that a similar fate could not befall me, that I won’t learn at the tip of a hat that everything I’m doing is worthless. But they say that accidents and paradigm shifts can happen at any time, and anyone who thinks that they are immune to them is going to have their gloves and socks knocked off one day.

I was feeling a little depressed about it, so today, on a whim, I went back along the route where I had lost my glove. About halfway through, I spotted a black glove by the side of the road. I stopped for a moment, but, alas, it wasn’t mine, so I moved on. Finally, just a few blocks from the end of my ride, I found it. It was lying in the street in an empty parking space. I stopped, picked it up, and tried it on. And you know what? It fit like a glove.

And just like that, I felt better. Perhaps worth is not something that just disappears, even if it might appear so. With a little effort, maybe it’s possible to salvage some or all of what seemed lost. Maybe what was lost was not the worth itself but only our perception of it. And even if, like all those mittens that I lost in kindergarten, there’s no hope of recovery, perhaps there is still some worth to be regained, say, as a rather contrived metaphor.

I was so happy afterwards that I didn’t even notice the other glove on my way back. It might have been gone, but in all likelihood it was still there and I just wasn’t paying attention. Ah well. I hope at least that someone out there is looking for it.

Cheers,
-qm

 

What’s missing?

The short answer:

Maybe I shouldn’t tell you.

The long answer:

My sister remarked to me recently that ever since they started selling orange juice that is fortified with calcium and vitamin D, she feels compelled to buy it over the normal stuff. This is not, of course, because she believes that her diet is low in calcium or vitamin D. Rather, how can she buy normal orange juice anymore, knowing that it isn’t fortified with anything? Of course, she claims that she can taste the difference—apparently the fortified stuff tastes more like bones and sunlight—but I’m skeptical.

I almost think that it’s a scam, that really all the juice is the same, just labeled differently. But the prices are also the same, so I’m not really sure what the point of the scam could be. Then again, maybe there’s more to it that I haven’t considered. But if that’s the case, would I want to know? Maybe I’d be perfectly happy believing there was no scam, just as I used to be perfectly happy drinking unfortified juice.

People hate to know that they are missing out on something, even if it is something in which they would ordinarily not be interested. Unfortunately, this simple principle is the basis of gossip, fads, and QVC, hence the downfall of civilization. One part of me would like to believe that there’s someone out there who isn’t susceptible to this. The other part of me wants to find out what he has that I don’t that makes him insusceptible.

I’ve always felt that I’ve missed out on a lot. I didn’t have as cool toys as everyone else when I was a kid. I didn’t have a real romantic encounter until, well, ever. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was twenty. I didn’t go to my senior prom. I didn’t have a college experience filled with debauchery. I’ve never written my name in the snow.

Of course, I’ve had a lot of other experiences that other people have missed, but is that supposed to make me feel better? You might argue that life only has time for so many experiences, so you’re bound to miss out on a lot. But then I think back to all those times when I wasn’t doing anything and I think, I could have been doing anything.

To some degree, such thinking is inevitable. We always want to know what we don’t have, and we always want what we know we don’t have. Maybe if I had done everything that I had ever wanted, I’d be writing instead about how I didn’t spend enough time doing nothing. Then again, I’d also be on a private jet from Monte Carlo to Liechtenstein right about now, so somehow that argument isn’t that satisfying.

The key, perhaps, is just to cherish what you do have. This doesn’t mean that you should forget about everything that the world has to offer, only that you should realize the difference between things that you really want and things that you want just because they’re there. It is a matter of knowing where you are in life and where you want to go without being distracted by such things as fortified orange juice. After all, just because you are missing doesn’t mean you have to be lost too.

Cheers,
-qm

 

Do you like to suffer?

The short answer:

A little more than I should.

The long answer:

Once in college, I drank an entire bowl of sour milk. I was eating a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats, and while I noticed the first bite had a rather strong aftertaste, I still dutifully finished my meal. It was not until I checked afterwards that I learned that the milk was a week past its expiration date and my minifridge was not up to the challenge. Well, that explains it, I thought.

You would think that having learned about eating rancid food, such a thing would never happen again, but it has. Just last week, I made a sandwich using some turkey that had been in my refrigerator for over a week. I even gave it a sniff before hand, and it did smell sort of nasty. But even though I had fresher meat, I figured the old stuff was good enough and went ahead and ate a sandwich with it anyway. The lettuce covered up the taste mostly.

I realize that this is pretty irrational behavior. If something has gone bad, and it is possible for one to avoid it, surely any rational person would do so. But sometimes this is not the way that I think. Sometimes I think to myself, well, this sucks, but life sucks sometimes, so you may as well learn to grin and eat it. I just remind myself that I’m building character and that I should call my gastroenterologist later. But it occurs to me that this may not be the healthiest option.

Near the end of my freshman year of college, everyone was assigned to a dormitory at which we would live out the rest of our college days. You chose a blocking group of eight people with whom you wanted to live, but otherwise the assignment was random. Obviously, some dormitories held greater prestige than others. When our assignment was delivered in a sealed envelope one sunny morning, one member of my group began chanting, “Anywhere but X, anywhere but X” (here X is the name of a particularly unsavory dorm that shall respectfully remain nameless). Naturally, X marked the spot where we would spend our remaining years.

My bedroom was small, just barely big enough for a bed, desk, and milquetoasty minifridge, and the windows barely opened. This was unsurprising as the whole building was made of concrete and looked like a jail. But even though it was possible to transfer (with some effort), it was in my nature to suffer it out, and so I did.

Halfway through my sophomore year, a friend of ours who lived in a different dorm came by for dinner one evening. Afterwards, she revealed that she was unhappy with where she was living and asked what we thought about her transfering to our dorm. To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded seeing her around more often, and she’s one of a handful of people from my college days with whom I still talk. But I told her that I didn’t think she should, that maybe if she were just willing to suffer through it a little longer, she’d come out a better person. After all, in life we draw lots sometimes, and from them we learn lots sometimes.

Fast forwarding, the room lottery was kind to me for the next two years, and it wasn’t that bad. As for my friend, she did end up transfering to my dorm, and it wasn’t that bad for her either.

Even though I see the merit in suffering sometimes, I realize that it may not be the only or the best option. It may be too hopeful to think that we can always avoid bad situations, but it may also be too destructive to think that we shouldn’t try. As such, the next time I find myself in an unsavory situation, I’ll try to remember to consider whether the suffering is really worth it.

I’ll also be sure to check the expiration date.

Cheers,
-qm

 

Why do you floss?

The short answer:

Mostly force of habit.

The long answer:

Do you ever have moments when you overthink perfectly ordinary things? The other day I was going through my usual bedtime routine, and while I floss regularly, for some reason that day it seemed like an utterly absurd thing to do. There I was, taking a thin piece of string covered in wax and pushing it repeatedly into all the gaps between my teeth and gums. What could possibly possess me to do such a thing?

Of course, I know that flossing is part of a proper oral hygiene regimen, which is presumably why I started doing it. (I wasn’t just sitting around one day, thinking to myself, hmm, I haven’t put anything in the gaps between my teeth recently…) But it is not something that makes me feel better in any obvious way, and I certainly do not think about staving off gingivitis when I floss. I could only conclude that I floss because it’s something that I do. Granted, that just begs the question, but it was late, and I wasn’t begging for an answer.

Unfortunately, that left me thinking about whether there are other things that I do just because they are things that I do. As a result, I felt very self-conscious for a few days for no particular reason. But it did lead me to thinking about some of my more peculiar habits.

For instance, I avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk, but I’m not sure why. I am not at all superstitious; if anything, I am substitious, if such an adjective exists. I don’t even feel bad if I accidentally step on a crack. So why do I do this? It’s just something I do. Maybe it gives me something to concentrate on when I’m walking around. More likely, I just started doing it one day and felt like keeping it up. I’m sure I could stop if I really wanted to. (Then again, isn’t that what smokers say?) But it does me no harm, except that I tend to look down as I walk and my gait is sometimes uneven, so why should I stop?

Here’s another example: I eat lasagna layer by layer. First I scrape off the top layer of cheese and sauce, then I eat the next layer of noodle, then I scrape out the next layer of ricotta, and so on. I didn’t even realize this might be strange until I decided that the purpose of lasagna is to be able to eat different ingredients together rather than separately. Again, it really does me no harm, except that perhaps I look uncouth at dinner parties. But since I usually feel uncomfortable at such events anyway, I’m going to eat however I damn well please.

I could go on and on: I wear my watch with the face on the inside of my wrist. I try to spend bills in increasing order of how crisp they are. I crack my toe knuckles. I read Garfield every day. I overthink things.

I’d like to think that it isn’t worth thinking about such details. After all, if there’s no obvious harm from something, why should it matter why we started doing it? But I feel that such complacency cannot be a good thing. Without reminding ourselves of our reasons and objectives from time to time, even when dealing with trivial matters, we can convince ourselves to continue doing obsolete, nonsensical, or even harmful things without realizing it. And even if you don’t believe it can be as pernicious as all that, it is easy to get in a rut if the logic behind your habits always runs in circles.

So take some time to think about the things you do that you don’t usually think about. Maybe you’ll realize that some of your old habits are worth breaking once and for all. Just please don’t stop flossing on my account.

Cheers,
-qm

 

Are you a people person?

The short answer:

Not at all. Or am I?

The long answer:

As you may recall, I am a hamster. I don’t like interacting with other people. The truth is that I don’t really like people, in that I would not like to take a road trip of any length with most people. Therefore I am definitely not a people person. (For all you psychology buffs out there, my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is INTJ.) But that wasn’t a very long answer, so of course there’s more to this story.

During my senior year of high school, I was in contention for a scholarship to attend a certain university. In order to make their final decision, they invited some forty students to visit for a weekend to interview for the ten or so scholarships. Before we showed up, they asked us to fill out an information sheet with some odd questions, such as “Name three books that you can never talk enough about.” I did not take it very seriously.

While they were conducting interviews, we all hung around outside, asking our fellow applicants how it went as they came out. The consensus was unanimous: it was awful. These were three-on-one deathmatches. The interviewers seemed determined to charbroil everyone and then serve a catered dessert. One guy, who had named Machiavelli’s The Prince as one of his three books, had been asked point-blank to summarize Chapter XVII. Someone else had literally been asked to justify his own existence. Another had been driven to tears. Another, spontaneous combustion.

Since I felt that I was especially bad at talking to people, I was a little nervous when it came time for my interview. After some introductions, someone asked about one of my three books, 1984, and my thoughts on privacy. I wasn’t really prepared to talk about this, so I gave a vague answer and then waited for the iron maiden to close. Luckily, another interviewer jumped in with a question that I had secretly been counting on and one that she had clearly been dying to ask: “I’m kind of curious as to why you put down The Cat in the Hat as one of your three books.” At that moment I thought to myself, wow, I’m a genius.

I was pretty relaxed for the rest of the interview, and it was a little surprising how natural it felt. Finally, for the last question, they asked: if you had a year to do whatever you wanted, and all expenses would be taken care of, what would you do? This is the sort of question that I would ordinarily say has no wrong answer, except that in reality I wanted to do nothing all day except perhaps swim through a giant money bank like Scrooge McDuck. And so, even though I am usually a very honest person, I made something up, and this is what I said.

Awhile ago I was talking to a friend of mine, and we were discussing how many people you get a glimpse of on the average day, on the street or wherever, just living their lives. Obviously it depends on who you are, but we concluded that for a typical person, it was hundreds, potentially thousands. That comes out to maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year. But how many people do you really know? You have maybe dozens of good friends, and maybe only hundreds of acquaintances, most of whom you don’t know that well. Even if you’re popular, you see many, many, more people in one year than you will ever know on a personal level. And each of these people carries with them a piece of the human experience that you will never know anything about. So I think I’d like to spend a year just meeting people, you know? Every day, I’d go out and find someone and just talk to them, try to really get to know them, find out who they are and what it is I’ve been missing out on.

I ended up getting the scholarship, and even though I didn’t end up attending the school, I still remember the interview for two reasons. First, the fact that I was so comfortable talking by the end indicated that, hey, maybe I could be a people person if I really wanted to. Second, maybe my last answer wasn’t as much of a lie as I thought it was. Maybe I would like to try going out and making real, human connections with other people. Perhaps the thing that’s been missing from my life has been an appreciation of other people’s lives.

Of course, I still find talking to people hard, and I still don’t know many people very well, nor they me. I guess that’s just my personality, so I’m fine with that. But I’d still like to think that one day, somehow, I’ll figure out a way for this hamster to break out of this cage and find out just what I’ve been missing.

Road trip, anyone?

Cheers,
-qm

 

Crunchy or creamy?

The short answer:

Creamy.

The long answer:

I usually try not to get into long-winded debates. I don’t like arguments, and I’ve found that it is basically impossible to change anyone’s opinion on anything. Luckily, I have no opinions on any subject of any importance, so it is pretty easy for me to avoid a debate with a well-timed shrug. But for some reason, when there is a nonsensical topic up for debate, I am compelled to be as argumentative as possible. Maybe I just need an outlet.

The other day, I got into a bitter debate about whether crunchy or creamy peanut butter is better—a bitter better butter debate. I feel that I am somewhat of a peanut butter connoisseur (let me know if you know anyone else who puts peanut butter on waffles), so this was one place where I felt I could hold my own. Like any sane person, I know that creamy peanut butter is far better for a number of reasons.

First, it is easier to eat than crunchy peanut butter. Food is meant to be eaten and enjoyed, and the added crunchiness in some peanut butter only hinders this process. You might then argue that I should prefer all my foods to come in liquid form, which is sort of disgusting. But while I do not deny that texture is an important part of how food tastes, crunchiness is far more important in, say, potato chips than it is in peanut butter. For one thing, the very stickiness of peanut butter means that it is inherently harder to chew even when smooth, and the crunchiness only compounds this fact. For another thing, peanut butter is not really a food by itself. Though some people eat peanut butter straight up, it is really a spread or condiment, meant to complement other things. There is a reason that other spreads and condiments are not crunchy, which is that they are not meant to stand out on their own. (Perhaps if you eat peanut butter by itself, you have an excuse to prefer it crunchy, but really, you should just be eating peanuts instead.) Also, potato chips are better crunchy because their main purpose is to be a crunchy potato snack. On the other hand, removing the crunchiness from peanut butter does not affect its ultimate telos, which is to be a spreadable form of peanuts.

This brings us to a second point, which is that crunchy peanut butter is also less spreadable than creamy peanut butter. As a result, it is harder to spread an even distribution. This is especially worrisome, since by its very nature as a butter or spread, it must be spreadable. Some people would say that the primary purpose of peanut butter is to taste like peanuts, and therefore having a similar texture to peanuts is more important than spreadability. Perhaps this is just a difference of opinion. But there is nothing stopping anyone from adding more peanuts to creamy or even crunchy peanut butter to make it more peanut-like in texture, and yet you never see anyone doing so. I would argue that this means that most people do not care very much about capturing the crunchiness of peanuts in their peanut butter, and that ultimately the smoothness is what carries most of the appeal.

Of course, our debate ended as all arguments do, in a draw, with neither side convincing the other. Afterwards, I began to think about whether a person’s views on peanut butter indicate anything about his or her personality. Perhaps I prefer my life like I prefer my peanut butter, smooth. Just as I try to avoid chewing crunchy peanut butter or getting into arguments, I try to avoid all bumps in the road of life. But is this a good thing? Some people say that it is by facing adversity head-on that we really grow. Would it behoove me to take a Skippy on the crunchy side of the street for once? Maybe I’d find out in a Jif what I’ve been missing out on. Perhaps I’ve been living with Peter Pan for too long, and I need to take another step in growing up.

Or perhaps I’ve just been stuck thinking about peanut butter for too long.

Cheers,
-qm