Being rude

 ⋆˚🐾˖°I don’t try to be rude. Social skills, social vibes whatever you call it I don’t really understand how all of it works. It’s hard to understand people and get along. I try to take things as they are. This is this. A banana is a banana. An apple is an apple. But people are complicated, and they generally don’t appreciate being told what they "are". (like I would know) That’s something I’ve stumbled into by accident.
      One time I was on a call and said, “Could you put the mic closer to your face?” The person got angry. To me, I was just trying to hear them. To them, something about it was upsetting. I didn’t understand why, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a reason. There wasn’t a reason I could see. There was a reason for them.
      You don’t know what somebody brings into an interaction. Maybe their brother used to put frogs in their sock drawer, hide the toilet paper, or do something much worse. Who knows? Maybe they spent years getting somebody to stop treating them a certain way. Then I come along and do something that reminds them of it, without having any idea. They’re thinking, “I don’t want this behavior around me anymore,” and I’m thinking, “What behavior? What are we talking about?”
     We’re all living in these individual realities, wagging a finger at somebody else’s completely different reality and saying it should be this or that. I have no idea how anything gets done. Maybe money helps because we can at least agree that money is money. But everything else, dude. Even colors don’t necessarily look exactly the same to everybody. You think you’ve found something everyone agrees on, and then there’s an exception, and an exception to the exception. It goes on forever.
     Meanwhile, you’re trying to work out who you’re even talking to. Is this an actual person? Is this a bot? Is somebody putting you on? And somewhere in all of that, I’m trying to communicate whatever’s happening inside my consciousness. First there’s the whole mixture going on in there, then my understanding of the concept, then the problem of turning it into words. I want it to come out clearly. Maybe beautifully. Something people understand. Something they want to hear. Something that actually says what I mean.
     Sometimes I’m explaining something to my wife, and she says, “How on earth did you come to that conclusion?” I’m thinking, “What are you talking about?” Then she brings up X, Y, and Z, and I’m like, “Whoa. That’s right. Why didn’t I think of that?” I knew those things. Why didn’t they come to mind? Why couldn’t they drift through that membrane between whatever I know somewhere in my head and whatever I’m consciously trying to understand?
     I want that understanding available when I’m trying to communicate. I want to express myself clearly, and I want to understand what somebody else is expressing, too. I get defensive when something feels disrespectful, even while I’m trying to understand how differently people communicate their experiences, their cultures, all of it. I suppose that brings me back to patience. Kindness. Understanding. Things I’m still trying to work out.
I don’t know what’s going on today. The sun is out. I think it would be a good day to clean the kitchen.≽^• ˕ •^≼