Work left to do.

Capella’s right. I don’t understand people who are ambivalent about having kids, but that is just part of not understanding people who are ambivalent about anything. Ambivalence is one of a couple areas where I can’t empathize, though I try.

I have a girlfriend, Le, whom I’ve known since high school. Le is awesome. I should tell you more Le stories, about the fucking attitude she’ll give to cops or scary thugs or anyone, and how they just stand there, blown away that such a beautiful lotus blossom could possibly know those words, much less call them that, and then she walks away before they’ve even got their breath back. Back when I wasn’t working and Le was “working from home”, we talked on the phone for hours every day. I used to think that I wasn’t good at empathizing with people, but Le is. Since we had plenty of time to talk, we would spend hours gossiping. A lot of that would involve wondering how someone could do such a thing. We would come up with a best guess, putting as much detail as we could into figuring out what the circumstances looked like to them. We would speculate about how you would have to feel to act like that, or what she must have been thinking.

Le’s worldview is darker than mine. She loves her family and friends, but where I go first for the most benign explanation possible, she’s willing to assume that people have worse motives. I don’t want the way she thinks to be true, but she’s been strikingly right about stuff I would never have believed. Months before my ex and ex-best friend broke open, Le met us for dinner at Thanh Long. She took one look at them, sitting at a table with eight other people, not particularly interacting with each other. Her eyes narrowed and when she leaned in for our hug, her exact words were “What the fuck is that?” She was right.

Claudia caught that shit too. She was saying things like “They spend an awful lot of time together.” back when I was still saying things like “Of course they do. We’re all best friends. You can’t understand the true depths of our beautiful friendship, the love we all share. I wish you wouldn’t malign our pure and special relationships with each other. Besides, she would never do that to me.” And Claudia was all “Why is he washing her car?”

Anyway, while I have no idea whether Le and I were accurate in all our gossiping, I did spend hours everyday trying to put myself in other people’s outlooks and think like they do. I think I’ve gotten better at empathizing. But not about ambivalence. I just don’t understand it; I can’t summon what it must be like to be indecisive. Sure, there are times when two options are about the same. But that just means they are equally good or bad, and I pick one arbitrarily. When choices aren’t equal, I always favor one and don’t look back. The worst of all situations is relevant uncertainty. You’ve likely already guessed that I hate uncertainty. I’ll adjust to what I have to, but uncertainty about important stuff is an especially vicious hell. Uncertainty can stop me for a while, but I’ll usually pick something, even something sub-optimal, just to end it.

The other thing I don’t get is shyness. I have finally learned that sometimes, people aren’t snubbing me if they don’t approach me all easy and friendly-like. I know that rationally, but have to remind myself before I build a reciprocal dislike. Some people are shy. Shy people are not disdainful, they are shy. I got that wrong for decades, but now I know. Maybe some day I’ll really understand.