Change the Way You Look at Things and the Things You Look at Change
A couple months ago I got a call from one of the people I used to live with at the boarding house where I previously resided. He did text me first, out of courtesy, but when we finally connected via phone he went on to explain that he had finally gotten a new job, which came along with a new apartment in Queens, which according to him, was paid for by the company he was going to be working for. This seemed kind of random to me, but he’s an older gentleman and he was explaining to me how the job he found was partly provided to him by an old industry friend and I figured that, to the extent that they knew each other, this friend was just doing him a solid and having his lodging provided for as a company expense, like a car.
P.S. Roughly three months later I spoke to another resident of that boarding house who visits the store where I work occasionally, and he informed me that that person still lives there. I texted him twice since getting that info, and he ignored both texts, presumably because he hadn’t moved. My second text to him a couple weeks ago was “How’s the new apartment?” This might sound passive-aggressive, which to a small extent it was, but keep in mind that I honestly don’t know what happened with this person, partly because the person I got the update from has a somewhat tenuous grasp of the English language and I wasn’t 100% sure that we were talking about the same person, and it was possible he really had moved, in which case the question still stood.
A couple weeks after that I got confirmation from another person who still lives at that boarding house that he does, in fact, still live there.
At the time, this pissed me off. I felt that he had really only called to boast about having found this wonderful new apartment and getting hooked up with a new job, and that after it fell through, there was no reason to talk to me. It seemed to me like he called me essentially to brag, almost as if he were in competition with me about leaving the old house, but that aside from that there was no reason to talk to me.
To give a real-time update here, I actually just called him but no one answered so I left a voicemail asking if he was able to move and wishing him well either way (which I do).
In the past couple of days, something else occurred to me though, which made me change the way I saw this sparse and select level of interaction with him. I was remembering that, a couple days before I was set to leave that house, I knocked on his door to ask him something I can’t remember right now, which necessarily involved my telling him that I was moving, and he shook my hand and congratulated me. Now, I know this person fairly well and he’s not really given to overt displays of politeness, so I think he was genuinely pleased that I was able to find an apartment.
That’s not to say he wasn’t competitive on some level, although that’s strange to me because I was never the one talking about how soon I was going to leave, which he did do, but I think his call was on some level an attempt to reach out and in his own way hope that I would be impressed by his news. In other words, in his mind I had been the one who had actually been able to get out of there, and he was calling me to tell me that, almost giving me an update on his situation, as someone who had already achieved what he was trying to do.
From this perspective, what he did was somewhat of a compliment to me.
Sometimes I feel that the modern world, with all of our advances in communication, is sort of behind in the sense that we all evolved to be able to interpret tonal changes in each other’s voice and even to optimally see facial expressions while talking to each other. In this example, all he was able to do was call me and tell me how excited he was to have found a place, but because he is a man of so few words and horrible at texting, like so many are, I really had nothing else to go on, and in all fairness, it was rude of him not to answer my texts. I stand by that.
My emotional response to his lack of any communication (besides that phone call) is part of a larger reaction on my part to the lack of any communication I’ve had with the people that I lived with in that house. Over the past few months since I moved, to the extent that I thought about those people, I was miffed by the fact that it seemed none of them ever called or even texted me to ask “How are you? How is the new apartment? I hope you’re good” or something similar. Even with the guy I’m talking about in this entry, he texted me to tell me about his new career opportunity, not to ask me how I was. I’m not really sure that was even brought up when he called.
Another person called me out of the blue to ask me if I could help him get a job. I’m not complaining about that, but why isn’t he at least asking how I am? I later spoke to him on the phone but he never once asked how the new apartment was.
Someone on the outside might think: “well, you got your new apartment, and they feel that you moved up while they’re still stuck there, so they don’t really feel the need to contact you” — but that doesn’t mean that you don’t informally follow up on someone that you literally used to live with. And generally I was well liked at that place. I was thought of as somewhat weird, but in the context of that house there really wasn’t anything that was “normal”. I bought a Christmas tree twice for the two years I resided there, and put it up both times. I’m just making the point that people generally liked me and most people there had my number, but no one bothered to ever ask me how I was doing. That hurts.
The other side of that though is that I’ve been thinking a lot about people’s motivations and abilities lately. My therapist told me that I should be proud of having made the move here, but there’s a level on which I feel that I just really couldn’t tolerate living at that house, and I was motivated, almost on a biological level, to move if possible, so that’s what I did. I’ve been thinking lately about the degree to which we’re all products of our environment and genes, and that it feels like very little we really do is attributable to any superiority of self, but just the cosmic situation we find ourselves in.
For instance, the former housemate who called me trying to get a job at Walmart. An outsider might read that and get the impression that this person is not particularly smart, especially considering his advanced age, if his main aspiration is to secure a job at Walmart, but that’s all he’s capable of. He was actually the closest thing I had to a friend at that house, and he was not particularly smart, but he was not stupid. He had a lot of interesting things to say and supposedly owned a company at one time. He talked to himself a lot so the other people there, who were constantly talking shit about each other, said that he had dementia, but nothing about the way he acted indicated that to me. I just thought that he was lonely and his mind was constantly running so he just sort of had an inner dialogue that was expressed outwardly.
My point is that trying to get a job at Walmart was basically the extent of his capabilities, and he was very honest about it. When I was doing his online application for him, he made it very clear that he would not be able to do a cashier position because he had “ADD”, and that he needed to either stock shelves or perform a janitorial/custodial function, but he had knowledge in all kinds of other areas. Before another housemate moved back in and I could no longer hang out with him (which is another story), he was obsessed with watching British shows from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s and on occasion I would watch them with him and he would explain various details to me. He was the closest thing I had to a friend there, but thinking about him I don’t think he was really capable of living alone in an apartment, and that he was there for a reason, but he hated it. I don’t think he hated it like me, but there were a lot of negatives about living there and he felt them as much as anyone else.
I spend a lot of time feeling like I’m not a very smart person, but I realize that the people who are intelligent are essentially a product of their environment, both genetic and lived. I don’t really feel that any one person is working harder than anyone else, at least in an inherent sense. This is part of the reason that criticisms of the degree to which someone is hard-working or not leave me somewhat cold. I feel that if someone feels it’s worth it to them, they will work hard for something, and if for whatever reason it’s not, obviously they will be lazy, or interpreted as lazy. I know it’s part of modern society to have hard work be a virtue, and that makes sense, but when I look at it from a more cosmic perspective (which is the way I look at everything), it just feels to me like no one is working harder than anyone else.
The trick for me is really to properly integrate that feeling and be OK with it, or even think it’s good. I want to be happy with myself and not constantly feel like I’m inferior because of my age, my looks, my intelligence, or any myriad arbitrary attributes.
Am I proud that I was able to move? Not really, but at the same time I’m happy that I did. I just wish some of those people had the emotional wherewithal to just reach out and say “How are you”.
