Just some more soul searching. Move along.

Something happened today that made me, as somethings often do, think. At some point while we were watching TV, I joked to my mother that “friends are a sign of weakness.” To my surprise, she took the statement seriously and was about to berate me before I assured her I was fooling. I followed up by asking her if she really thought I was that much of a creep, to which she replied yes and backed up her accusation with a time in high school when I declared that there was no one in the entire school that I considered to be a friend.

The conversation ended there (no one should think ill of my mother, I’m glad that she can be so open with me), but my thoughts kept rolling all the way to the keyboard. I don’t deny this high school declaration, in fact I reaffirm it. In my short time as a part-time student there, I never met any kids who I considered worth becoming friends with. This is not to say that I was socially inept, not to say that I isolated myself from my peers. On the contrary, I especially conversed with kids in my English classes. I’m told by younger students of my high school who I run into that seniors still mention me every once in while. Whether I should take that as a compliment or not is something I don’t know, but I don’t think I ever acted like a jerk or a stick-in-the-mud. I tried to get along with people. I think I’m a friendly guy by nature -- people always tell me I am. But when it came down to actual friendship, as opposed to say acquaintance, I just had no interest.

Why is this? My first answer would be that no one really sparked my interest. No one seemed to have the same interests as me; the kids I associated with the most were relative brainiacs, but a memory for the Bronte sisters or advanced algebra isn’t something that I think any kid really looks for in a good friend. Otherwise, as far as my eye could see, the kids of my school were only interested in things I considered boring or antagonistic to my interests, i.e. sports, school politics, and relationships. I believe I’ve already expressed my possible reasons for social discomfort in a previous post.

But after I’ve gotten that line of reasoning out of the way, I begin to think that maybe I’m just too fucking picky. Maybe if I just gave people a chance, I could get to like them better. The thing, I think, is that I’m afraid that I’ll grow bored with them too quickly. A person can only be so interesting before whatever you have in common dissipates.

The other thing I’m afraid of is that I’ll say something offending. My breed of humor relies a lot on satire and the improbable, even incomprehensible. I make a lot of jokes about social prejudices and stereotypes when I’m with friends. I don’t consider it offending -- I don’t actually believe anything that I might spout -- but a stranger might leave with a bad image of me. Sometimes if I get too comfortable, especially when I worked at the hardware store and was surrounded by kids my age, I actually find myself talking down to people. Purely out of good humor of course; to my recollection I have never, ever meant to offend someone. But I sometimes leave a conversation thinking, “did I go just a little too far?” The amazing thing, however, is that my sarcastic and possibly scathing remarks actually seem to go over people’s heads.

Now, I utterly despise the notion of suggesting that I might be smarter than others. Even if I might snicker at the hicks in these parts as they spend five minutes trying to figure out how to save a number on their cell phones, I know that, if the roles were reversed and I was looking down the wrong end of a two-by-four or a carburetor, they’d be scoffing at me. But I’m not going to deny that my best friends are smart people. Not only can they tell when I’m being sarcastic at them, but they can grab that sarcasm, swing it around by the irony, and hurl it right back at me without losing the cushion of good humor that came with it. I’m friends with my friends because they’re smart, funny, opinionated people who don’t let the negatives of the world get in the way of a good (or even a bad) joke. And because they’ve got cool toys. Like Gamecubes. And Macs.

I guess what my resistance to new friends boils down to is a fear of entering a relationship that won’t last. My ideal friend is smart, good-natured, and shares my interests, and if one of those boxes isn’t checked, I’m afraid that we might not be able to get along, prompting me to turn to rejection. It’s like in that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry wants to “break up” with his friend. I think I take friendship too seriously, like Jerry. I kind of need over it, with an almost obsessive compulsive passion, like Jerry. Which is why I only have two to four friends, like Jerry.

Oh god, I’ve become a Seinfeld character.