Friends?

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be more sociable. I often talk about not having too many friends and interacting with people is the way to make friends. I get invited to events every now and then but I usually make some excuse for not going. This year its going to be different. I’ll make a better effort to take people up on their offers to get together and socialize.

The problem I have with this is the actual interacting with people, making small talk and trying to be friendly. That doesn’t sound like much fun to me. I’m joking of course. It’s the general pubic, The Great Unwashed who I hold in contempt. Years of working with the public in the retail industry scarred me for life.

Every so often I’ll get a call from someone I haven’t heard from in a very long time. Each time the conversation usually goes something like this:

Caller: “Hi Mike, how are you doing?”
Me: “Fine, how are you?
(note: we both know we could care less how the other is doing but go through the ritual anyway)
Caller: “I haven’t talked to you in a long time and thought I would say ‘Hello.’”
Me: “Great, nice to hear from you. How’s your family?”
Caller: “They’re fine. Say, do you have any autoshow tickets/a car for the weekend/time to fix my home computer?”
Me: “Um..I thought you were calling to say “Hello.”
Caller: “Yes but while I have you on the phone..”
Me: CLICK.

Now I don’t mind helping out people that are nice to me. I’ll go out of my way to take care of them any way I can. I don’t expect anything in return. It’s the people who are only around when THEY need something that I reject. Snubbing their requests for favors doesn’t bother me since not having them around wouldn’t be a problem.

These are things my therapist and I will be discussing this week.