This was not what I meant to talk about tonight.

There are too many…frustrating people to deal with lately. So many things piss me off, manifested in so many different ways through different personalities. I’ve never really liked people in general, which has usually made it hard for me to make friends, although this has caused any actual friendships to be rather solid. I’m starting to believe that “hate” isn’t too strong a word. Even though I feel like I’ve been able to come a long way in my tolerance of others and of the human race in general, there are still times when I feel like putting an axe through someone’s head.

Everywhere I go in everything I do, I run into at least one person I can’t stand. I can’t begin to explain myself, because every time I try I get flustered. Even at the table tennis club, when all I want to do is forget everything and focus on a single goal, I run into annoying, cocky, social rejects. Even when I simply try to relax and hang out with my friends, there are people there who just seem created to rub me the wrong way.

It’s all made me appreciate the friendships I do have. Even when I think of all the vexing situations people put me in, I feel I have little to complain about. My closest friends completely make up for the fucking idiots I have to deal with all the time.

Sometimes, that’s just hard to keep in mind.

I went out yesterday with Trolley and Wheaties to a sort of gathering at the Cabin. We didn’t know anyone there, and just sat around while the gigantic group of friends there was insipidly superficial and obnoxious. Some idiotic drunk girl kept hitting my head with her arms and body (unintentionally) while she was talking to some guy. Trolley, Wheaties and I downed our beers (I had an EX, which was much better than anything they had on tap with it’s darker, richer flavour, but it started to taste like rust after a while) and headed off to the Dom for some pool instead. Sometimes I just can’t stand people, and yesterday was one of those times.

Let’s see…what’s on the hate plate today?

I hate it when people, sequacious, superficial, pretentious, ignorant people express false emotions. I hate it when people feign the extent to which their emotions take over them, for whatever reason. This is all ESPECIALLY true when the person happens to be my age or older.

I suppose I’m oversensitive to things like this. I see fake emotions almost as a mockery of any true ones that I have. I hold my emotions as an important part of my life, and try to experience each one with gravity and appreciativeness. It’s rare that I can be affected by things so much that my emotions take over me, so I don’t take happiness or sadness lightly, especially when someone else pretends to experience them. I’ve lived too long as an unfeeling being, as someone who cared for nothing, to have some idiot pretend to appreciate what has become an essential part of my life.

Some people never grow up.

I realized a little while ago that I respect self-understanding much more than self-confidence. It’s such a pity, because many people I know have much more of the latter than the former. I use the words self-understanding in an almost contradictory manner, though one can be both. I see it as an understanding of one’s faults and one’s limits. I use these words in this manner because I find that one whom is blind to one’s faults is someone who has little or no self-understanding.

When someone has little self-understanding, it almost angers me. The ignorance involved is a very difficult thing for me to comprehend. If someone refuses to admit to his or her faults, or perhaps is aware of them but refuses to change them, then I see them as being very childish. And childishness, of course, is something that bothers me greatly.

I usually find that an open-minded person is very aware of his or her faults. Perhaps I simply associate a lack of open-mindedness with self-ignorance, though I haven’t seen much evidence to the contrary.

My experience with this idiotic characteristic has made me bitter. I seem to have lost much faith in the human race, something that I realized even longer before this. It has left me alone, with few people I can truly feel comfortable with, or respect.

Maybe it’s better this way.

I found out about a book called Soul Mountain by a man named Gao Xingjian. I read the summary, and found out that it had won a Nobel prize for literature in 2000. I was very interested. Apparently it’s an œuvre in which he explains many facets of his life, which I imagine has much to do with persecution in China. I would very much like to read it, but I still have Moby Dick to finish, and the Moonstone to start. I’d also like to get through The Glass Bead Game, which is also a Nobel laureate, but a book I once found too dense in vocabulary to comprehend. Many of the reviews I’ve found about the Glass Bead Game say that it’s a book which has changed peoples lives, and from what I can tell, it’s a book which not many can sort through (i.e. pseudo-intellectuals can’t use it as a phantom symbol of their superior knowledge).

Speaking of intellectual poseurs, I was in contact with one just the other day, though on friendly terms. She didn’t say anything that made me think of intellectual superficiality, but as I hadn’t spoken to her in a while, and her being one of the few that I know, I was reminded of this strange complex. I feel compelled to write about it.

I’m not quite sure what it is about this aspect of a person that makes me go mad with frustration. Perhaps it’s the fact that they don’t truly understand things which I may find beautiful. All I can think is, “You’re missing the message!”, or “Who did you get that opinion from?”.

Of course, I understand that people may see beauty in different ways, and interpret an artists message quite differently than other people. I suppose that it’s not in their opinion that I see shallowness, it’s how they come to that opinion.

Take American Beauty, for example. The pseudo-intellectuals that I know enjoy that movie because they find the symbol of the roses to be so deep. The think that the image of the plastic bag is so meaningful. They don’t realize that all of the symbols, all of the imagery is just handed to them. All they see is a character who thinks intellectually in the film and they think, “Wow. This movie is so deep”.

I guess it’s better than an ignorant person saying, “I didn’t like Magnolia, it was trying to be all weird and stuff”. At least the poseurs are trying to be smart. Of course, I even know complete idiots who say that they enjoyed American Beauty because it “made them think”.

I simply wish that a pseudo-intellectual would try to actually comprehend something, instead of using popular opinion, or believing that something is meaningful simply because there is a meaningful element. Or that they would have no opinion on a piece of art they don’t understand, instead of disliking it for the fact.

Of course, I wouldn’t appreciate the truly intellectual people I know without them.

I’m just not sure if it’s worth it anymore.