Sociopathic Mental Noise

"Why on earth," I thought suddenly and clearly to myself, while lying down half-dozing after work, "would anyone want lettuce for breakfast?"

Remind me to cover my head with aluminum foil before napping.

This odd thought popped into the midst of somewhat more rational ponderings on the fragility of human feelings, a topic brought up by a minor incident at work this afternoon. Have you ever noticed how predictable people are? It takes longer to pick up on the patterns in some people's behavior than others' - some people are fairly open; some we can relate to more closely than others; sometimes we have personal reasons to resist acknowledging what motivates someone else, which can throw off our judgment - but people are usually not too surprising overall.

Not in retrospect, anyway.

You also start to notice, as you get older (and I am speaking with the voice of Miss Marple here, so you have to imagine me patting your hand, calling you "sonny," and offering you a nice cup of tea) that there are broad categories of behavioral patterns that most people fall into. In other words, with of course a reasonable degree of individual variation, you run into the same people again, and again, and again. I have one coworker I have a really hard time not addressing as "Louis" because he reminds me so intensely of someone else I once knew.*

I think most of us like to feel we have a very private and sacrosanct core, something deep within that no one else can understand unless we privilege them with a closer look. But none of us really does, except in the general sense that the universe does not center around us, so everybody else isn't constantly analyzing our behavior and trying to figure out what makes us tick.** But essentially, we're all pretty transparent (unless of course we're barking mad and nobody can figure us out because we're so random). Still, I really think one of the most heartless things one person can do to another is make it clear that they genuinely understand them. It's the ultimate violation of personal space.

So you tiptoe around the people you know; but the better you know them, the more you get to drop the pretenses and acknowledge the uncomfortable intimacy of understanding, which is okay because you operate on a mutually-assured-destruction clause of shared vulnerability. I think this is a fairly automatic social behavior; like language, it's innate, and most people have learned how to avoid giving offense, how to get along smoothly in society from a fairly early age,*** without necessarily having to be able to quantify what you are doing.

I could go on and on (do ya think?!) but this post can probably be summed up in three points:
1. I'm really anxious to be considered one of the smart kids;
2. Still I will lament being surrounded by men who are only interested in me for my mind;
3. None of this really means anything. I personally am completely befuddled by my lack of abililty to relate to others and by my own wishes and fears, not to mention lettuce-eating alien space rays.

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*His name was "Louis."
**Except for me.
***Government employees excepted, apparently.