I’m an idiot sometimes. Too much of the time, anyway

… She assured me she and all her people are real “achievement-oriented” people. Sure glad I’m not.

And that depressed me. I don’t want to talk newspapers all the damn weekend. I’m not a hyper journalist. Not that I don’t want to talk newspapers, I do, but not that seriously. Hell, even the coach said she wanted to stop talking shop and just go drink. That made me laugh in sympathy.

And that’s not even all. P__ came back today. She’d been to the office Monday, I guess, but I missed her. I don’t know — she got back from Guatemala. I haven’t seen her since we danced (fast style, you know — well, she and Ryan danced and I made an idiot of myself with athletic and clumsy gyrations). She came in and came to me sitting at the computer, and I wasn’t enthralled to see her. I just wasn’t, somehow. She was pretty and smiling and all, but she was just in to say hi, not to really talk, and she had short-haired Boy-O in tow, standing near the door looking bored while she talked to us (Boy-O could’ve been a brother, I don’t know). I wanted to tell her how it has sucked this summer …

But I know P____ doesn’t like me. We could never be a couple, because 1) she doesn’t love me, and 2) even if she did, the religion thing wouldn’t work out.

But I guess the biggest thing, and maybe the burr under my saddle that is the basis for the whole funk, is that I’m an idiot sometimes. Too much of the time, anyway. I just say dumb f***ing things — like to R__ about B____ Street being the crime center, and it was in his … police report and how crime is always on that street and I laughed and he just f***ing walked away, treating me like the biggest f***ing idiot, the social outcast who doesn’t know when to shut up, and suddenly my laugh sounded hollow and fake.

But it obviously isn’t just R__. I’ve been very judgmental lately, of others and myself. With others: I had all these opinions against [people from a certain college], and somehow felt I needed to share my judgments with others — which is the process of taking others into confidence, creating an “us” and opposing to us this “other.” This of course assumes the person I tell my thoughts to will think and judge as I do, will see the other as the odd one, not me — and will not see me as petty and negative. It isn’t the case that this is always true.

[From journal of Thurs., 27 July 1995, Journal 10, page 159-162]