Talkie Talkie

I have never been one to ignore people but for very complicated reasons I isolated myself from people related in some fashion to my husband’s work. In most situations, such a choice would in no way be bad, but since my husband is in the military it had consequences. My last entry involved me ranking for a while about them and their lack of communication. Since that post I’ve come to realize that in the same way that any school is different or any company, the same can be said for different groups within the military, like say the crewmen aboard any given submarine. They each have their own personality as it were.

You’d be amazed at how much insight you loose when you don’t communicate with someone, or in my case, several people for a while. I was taken back by how many negative feelings were just simply tied into the distance and much less into any kind of anger or resentment or disrespect. People can change a hell of a lot, but in some odd way, they don’t really. Part of me wants to say that a person’s personality doesn’t change, but that doesn’t seem correct. I’m not sure, just that it’s silly to be afraid of people simply because you haven’t spoken in a while.

Oddly enough, the same day that I was figuring all this out in my own life I had to deal with this at a completely different angle. Why the heck someone bothers me up here in dear old Maine to ask me how someone is doing is beyond me really, but I guess curiosity always did kill cats at least. I wish I could say that I don’t ever allow my life to influence what I have to say to someone to too much of a degree, but it’s a dangerous land if someone asks me for advice. If it’s someone I know well, encounter frequently, then it’s easy to tailer my advice to their life, but when they are hundreds if not thousands of miles a way, well, lets just say my bag of ideas becomes limited.

It is definitely one of the great downfalls to internet and text messaging. The words can cover that much distance, but the rest has to be filled in by the person reading it. I think in the same way we are drawn to car crashes and burning houses we are drawn towards ideas of dramatic conspiracies. People read words from someone they haven’t spoken to in a while and they fill in the gaps with what they want and don’t take the time to step back and view the communication from some other angle then the way it was initially received. And forget people following up such things with a phone call. Believe me, I do all the time and people rarely return them.

So yes, that is where it stands, I’m not crazy and nor is anyone else. I know, it’s a lame point to a long blog entry, but sometimes I wish for every election sign there was one saying that, then maybe people would begin to believe. Well, okay, there is that one lady from Alaska who seems to think that despite not even knowing where most countries in the world are on a map, she seems to think we should trust her with running the place.

Hopefully, she’ll never have to make a decision on where to send an atomic bomb, she might end up bombing Beijing instead of North Korea and that would be a shame. They just make the place all pretty like with the Olympics and all. But hey, if people really think that the biggest problem facing this country is the Roe versus Wade decision of thirty years ago and not something like education, health care or the economy, then by all means vote for a couple of people who care about your right to let other people choose for you. After all, you have more important things to do and worry about, right?