equivocality » Blog Archive

Posted in: Thoughts | Tags: realization, reflection, social commentary

I’ve realized that I have a hard time looking in the eyes of people I can’t stand.

It’s as if I don’t want to be dishonest to them. That no matter how much I hate them, I still feel like they deserve to know the truth. At least I can be…honourable about this, independent of how I feel about the person.

I hold honesty at a very basic level of human integrity. I can’t believe how many people I know who pretend to be friends with people they can’t stand. It all seems so phony, unless they’re forced to be friendly due to specific circumstances (such as being married into a new family, moving in with unknown roommates, etc.). Sometimes the false friendliness gives people the wrong idea, and they start to hang around even more, and everything just gets worse.

I’m glad that I find it hard to lie to someone, although I’m also a little scared by the fact that it’s so hard for me to hide something such as this. I’ve always been a terrible interpreter of body language, and in turn have never had much luck with hiding/manipulating my own. Of course I can hide it when I really want to, but it’s a lot harder when I don’t give a shit about the person. Most people, I don’t care enough about to actually hide anything.

And it shows.

2 comments — Follow the feed

#1tina

I’m one of those people who can hide dislike pretty well, but it’s usually due to circumstances beyond my control - for example, I dislike quite a few people at work. Making this obvious would only make things awkward. So instead, I have conversations with them and make everyone around me realize what complete asses they are, so that if I decide to make fun of them later, people will back me up. Some people I just simply cannot even look at, they’re that annoying to me. There’s this one guy at work who’s a complete slacker. He used to be a chat tech agent like me, but he got switched to phones because his inefficiency became that obvious. When he used to sit near the chat stations, I couldn’t even stand sitting next to the guy because even having him in my peripheral vision would annoy me for the rest of the night.
All in all, I generally like most people, or even if I do dislike someone, I find something I like about that person and focus on that. It makes life a lot more bearable. However, there are a few exceptions - like that guy.
I tend to not hang around people I dislike. My group of friends used to be tightnit because we got rid of all the people who we didn’t like by simply being weird - our sense of humour doesn’t appeal to most people.
Body language IS hard to control, no matter if you got talent doing it or not.
Blah blah blah.

#2Jeff

I do hold things such as work, etc. to be a “forced” time spent with people. There are so many cases such as that, where one has to pretend to make things go smoothly.

And I know what you mean about being unable to stand someone when they’re just sitting there. I used to go nuts when that happened to me, but I think I’ve become used to it, since I’ve been put in that situation so much.