A lesson begun to be learned
I used to blog a lot. I am familiar with the feeling of reading a post one has written 5+ years ago and thinking, Wow, I was an idiot. Wow, that situation wasn’t nearly as simple as I thought. Wow, what a forced triplet.
I think this post is most likely to be one of those posts I will wonder why I had written. Not ‘wish I hadn’t written,’ but wonder why I was so certain about everything. That’s the thing that doesn’t age well: certainty.
Unfortunately discretion doesn’t give you any content to begin with. And polite uncertainty doesn’t make for great prose. I mean, I guess, like, it could. But I’m unpracticed in that voice and <other excuses to continue on this trajectory>.
It helps knowing that you don’t give a fuck how I feel about this in 5 years. You just want the deets, and meanwhile you might make judgments about me. Yes, I’m ridiculously confident about my assessment of people’s character. The thing is, most of the time I’m right. I used to operate under the 50/50 “I could be wrong” rule, but that’s like all those stories where people with superpowers say they aren’t going to use them: they end up using them. They accept the downsides.
Not only am I confident in my assessment of people’s character, lately Donald Miller has convinced me that I should act on those assessments. He was on a kick where that was all he wrote about.
Summary of the DM philosophy: Yeah, it’s kind of callous to be choosy about friends, but friends are what make you into who you are, so treat it more seriously. I think DM, like me, tends to be forgiving to a fault so we have to do intentional work on boundaries. For everyone else out there, you learned this shit in preschool.
Last year when Jesse was still in the states, Jesse and Jane had a party at their apartment. Jesse had no shortage of friends; the apartment was full. But these people. There was nothing compelling to me about 90% of these people.
In China, the quality of people that were his friends was an improvement. I believe this is simply because the pool got better. It takes some ambition to teach English in a foreign country, and ambition can hone one’s character.
This one guy
But there was this one guy. Let’s call him Cano. It’s like Canon, the camera company, but you take off the last letter.
Cano was the reason Jesse and Jane were in China in the first place. The first time I ever saw Cano, I was playing mafia with a group of people. Cano was texting Jesse that he was going to be there in 15 minutes, 10 minutes, almost there, and then when Cano arrived, Jesse stopped playing mafia to hang out with him. That night, Cano convinced Jesse and Jane that they should come to China to teach English, and the next morning it was announced to me that, hey, we’re leaving the country in 2 months!
I was totally blindsided by that.
Thus my first impression of Cano was that he didn’t seem too friendly, to be fine with a friend making that decision overnight.
An aside: One of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing right now, life-wise, is I expected Jesse and Jane to be in the neighborhood for a year. I expected to have friends around me, to have an in. HAHAHAHA. Idiot.
Back to China
I had never officially met Cano before China. I hardly saw him when he took Jesse away from the mafia game. I knew of him, because he went to my grandmother’s church, is considered a missionary there, and my grandmother loves him. When it came time to taking sides, when I was telling my parents how annoying Cano was while my grandmother was in the vicinity, well, my grandmother told me to shut up.
“Cano is my friend, and I won’t have you talking badly about my friends.”
I don’t like saying stuff about people that could endanger their source of income or credibility. But, in a credibility fight between me and Cano, I think Cano would win. Grandma is evidence of that. So… phew! Continuing on.
I’m trying to think of a character Cano reminds me of so you can better understand him. The problem is, the charlatan type of character seems to be portrayed as either really smart or really stupid, and Cano was in between. He’s gifted at talking at length. He’s funny. He’s observant. He works hard at learning shit, and likes to talk about how hard he’s working at learning shit. He’s attractive enough that his smile is disarming. Not in the “my knees are weak” sense but the “I trust this guy” sense.
Aside #2: As I’m writing this, I’m thinking, why am I even telling you about Cano? He doesn’t play any role in the conclusion of the broad story. There isn’t any major scandal involving him. And yet it feels like a blatant omission to keep silent. Is this the snake oil having its way with me? Even the skeptic is not immune? The truth is I find him interesting, troubling, and I’m writing towards my gut. Also it’s not as though he’s totally uninvolved.
I guess he’s like Mr. Elton, but less foolish.
The first time I interacted with him was in front of the Walgreens-type store I frequented, the one with the M&Ms? He was late to arrive. When he did arrive, he walked up to us with no eye contact, stared to the side, and said amicably, “Where’s Jesse?” He bounced on his toes like he was cold, but looking back, was probably an excess of energy. Jane explained where Jesse was — he had run back to get his camera — and I waited to be introduced, but that never happened. He complained about how hungry he was, and I suggested he grab something from the Walgreens store, which he did. Still no eye contact. Without the eye contact, I felt weird introducing myself.
I thought, “I’ll introduce myself when he comes back,” but by that time Jesse had arrived and Cano launched into an eager conversation with him, and my introduction was delayed forever. What was also delayed forever was him apologizing for keeping us waiting on the street for 15 minutes.
Did we ever speak beyond a breakfast suggestion? Yes, at one point during our 2-hour bus ride, I did ask him about himself. He didn’t ask about me. So I asked him more about himself, and the conversation petered out because I was too stubborn to continue the non-cycle.
This was our major interaction, so I can only surmise that it was from this he gleaned that I had a crush on him, and relayed that to Jesse later.
I started to write the next part, about our 1-day excursion together. It’s going to be a picture-heavy post so I will do that next.
We went here.
This is the only pretty picture. Don’t worry. The others aren’t color-corrected and nothing will make you jealous.
In conclusion
My talk about friends at the beginning of this had no concrete payoff. For being such a concrete point, you think it would. I do think it ties into the entire narrative or I wouldn’t have written it.
I also talked about seeming arrogant to myself 5 years from now. I guess that will span a few posts too.
I had some writer’s block starting this portion of the story. It’s probably because I struggled with how to introduce Cano (if at all), with how to relay the 1-day excursion (it’s halfway written now), and how to begin to parse all the friend drama I was exposed to. Am I going to tell you every bit of friend drama that happened? No. I don’t remember most of it because most of it was dumb. Perhaps me saying, essentially, “Wow, your friends really do define your life,” is my way of capturing the spirit of it.
….
I just took a few minutes to think, and here’s what I think happened.
I think I had always agreed with the Donald Miller stuff in theory. I’d always been pretty good at cutting out selfish friends, so the catharsis those posts gave me was in no longer feeling guilty about it. But there was a big part of DM’s posts that I’d had no experience with, that I wasn’t sure if I agreed with, and that was judging friends based on their friends. In China I learned the wisdom of that.
When Cano didn’t introduce himself to me, I noticed it. I judged him for it. Why didn’t I then downgrade both Jane and Jesse for not correcting him? Instead I wiped it from their record. I made their excuses. Thus I continued to torture myself when, every time we had a tiff, I was the one with the problem. Because they were awesome people!
I know these are all “duh” lessons to certain people of age or personality. I did wise up by the end, though.
I wasn’t going to share this quote from one of DM’s posts on friendships, but I gasped when I read it earlier and it fits better now. Think of it as foreshadowing.
If somebody identifies as a victim (even a strong pessimistic attitude toward life) I keep my distance. Sooner or later people who identify as a victim are going to paint you as an oppressor. Victims need to be victims of somebody, and you can count on it that that somebody is going to be you eventually. Believe it or not, there are people who want to be victims because if they are victims they don’t have to take responsibility for their lives and they think they will attract help or a rescuer. Certainly you may wrong a friend, we all do, but you want friends who will talk openly and honestly about what you’ve done and make amends, not flop on the floor like a European soccer player.
