Henri Nouwen once wrote about how when you write something, sometimes people assume that that one piece is your whole life. And I'm not at all comparing myself to Henri Nouwen, but I'm feeling that dynamic this week. I wrote a little commentary on Relevant's website on The Office versus Grey's Anatomy, and one poster left a comment saying something like, "Why don't you go read a book instead or do something that makes the world a better place? If this is the biggest problem you have to write about, you should rethink your priorities." (You can read everything here.)
I know I have to let it roll off my back, but comments like this always cut me deep. I have to tell myself that this guy doesn't know anything about me. I do read books and I do try to help people. I just wrote a single thousand-word tract about the minutiae of two TV shows because I think obsessive analysis is fun and funny. And what's wrong with a little levity every now and then, anyway?
I think I can forgive this guy, though, because as easy as it is to assume a person's whole character on the basis of one article, it's even easier to judge people too harshly for the comments they throw down. There's a chance I might like him if I met him in person---I too think more people should care about making the world better.
Still, it's his loss that we're not friends.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Thursday, August 2, 2007
So Anyway...
Eventually I agreed to meet Tim for coffee on a Wednesday night after church. As I walked away from the church building, junior high kids clambering everywhere under the dusky summer sky, I approached my boss’s wife, Lecia.
“Hey, um, I need a weird favor.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I’m taking off to go get coffee with someone. Could you call me in, like, forty-five minutes?”
She looked at me darkly, but with a spark of amusement. “What are you doing?”
“Just . . . meeting someone . . . that I haven’t actually met yet in person. If you could just call and make sure I’m not in the trunk of someone’s car or something, that would be fabulous.”
“Oh. My. Gosh. How did you meet him? Please don’t say the Internet.”
“Um . . .”
“Jess.” She looked skyward, exasperated and plaintive. “Okay. Forty-five minutes.”
“Thanks,” I smiled.
I’d scoped out pictures of Tim on his grad school’s alumni website, so I had a rough, somewhat pixilated idea of what he looked like. When I stepped through the glass door at Starbucks and looked to my right, I saw him there in front of the merch shelves, standing flat-footed and rocking slightly as he sipped his beverage, waiting for me.
Sometimes when you meet someone with whom you’ve corresponded only in text, you have the sense of suddenly understanding more fully everything they’ve ever written to you. This wasn’t quite one of those times. Tim’s physical presence and the things I already knew about him somehow seemed to have a complimentary relationship, and the overall Tim effect was patterned and multi-colored. Like the shirt he wore.
But, thankfully, I read him as entirely non-threatening, and thirty minutes later, I had a conversation with Lecia that probably sounded to Tim something like this: “Hey. . . . Yeah, everything’s cool. . . . Thanks, I appreciate it. . . . Okay, bye.”
He looked genuinely hurt when I reenacted my trunk joke.
The conversation proceeded with reasonably few awkward pauses. At some point, though, after the first hour or so, I retreated back behind my eyes a little bit, removing myself just slightly. I do this sometimes when I’m scared or just too tired to interact. I can’t help it.
Unfortunately, I think he thought I was bored. And so he decided to liven things up with some history. He went on relatively uninterrupted for a good thirty-five minutes about the Protestant Reformation. I fidgeted with sugar packets and fleetingly thought about fashioning my stir stick into a rudimentary tool with which I might signal for help.
Tim was with me—either on our third or fourth coffee session—when I called to decline the position in Capital City. And soon there would be an eighth coffee and an eleventh coffee, and within a couple months, I would consider Tim my closest friend. I think we even might have been dating for about seventeen minutes, but I’m not sure; in any case, we decidedly landed on friends, and he was the only one I knew was my friend for the sake of being friends, not out of the convenience of attending church or working together. This was probably because he was into relationships—he thought about them a lot and consciously did things to further them. I knew I could count on him calling every couple weeks or so. And I can't be the first to have noticed that when people do things like this, it makes you feel worth knowing.
“Hey, um, I need a weird favor.”
“What is it?”
“Well, I’m taking off to go get coffee with someone. Could you call me in, like, forty-five minutes?”
She looked at me darkly, but with a spark of amusement. “What are you doing?”
“Just . . . meeting someone . . . that I haven’t actually met yet in person. If you could just call and make sure I’m not in the trunk of someone’s car or something, that would be fabulous.”
“Oh. My. Gosh. How did you meet him? Please don’t say the Internet.”
“Um . . .”
“Jess.” She looked skyward, exasperated and plaintive. “Okay. Forty-five minutes.”
“Thanks,” I smiled.
I’d scoped out pictures of Tim on his grad school’s alumni website, so I had a rough, somewhat pixilated idea of what he looked like. When I stepped through the glass door at Starbucks and looked to my right, I saw him there in front of the merch shelves, standing flat-footed and rocking slightly as he sipped his beverage, waiting for me.
Sometimes when you meet someone with whom you’ve corresponded only in text, you have the sense of suddenly understanding more fully everything they’ve ever written to you. This wasn’t quite one of those times. Tim’s physical presence and the things I already knew about him somehow seemed to have a complimentary relationship, and the overall Tim effect was patterned and multi-colored. Like the shirt he wore.
But, thankfully, I read him as entirely non-threatening, and thirty minutes later, I had a conversation with Lecia that probably sounded to Tim something like this: “Hey. . . . Yeah, everything’s cool. . . . Thanks, I appreciate it. . . . Okay, bye.”
He looked genuinely hurt when I reenacted my trunk joke.
The conversation proceeded with reasonably few awkward pauses. At some point, though, after the first hour or so, I retreated back behind my eyes a little bit, removing myself just slightly. I do this sometimes when I’m scared or just too tired to interact. I can’t help it.
Unfortunately, I think he thought I was bored. And so he decided to liven things up with some history. He went on relatively uninterrupted for a good thirty-five minutes about the Protestant Reformation. I fidgeted with sugar packets and fleetingly thought about fashioning my stir stick into a rudimentary tool with which I might signal for help.
Tim was with me—either on our third or fourth coffee session—when I called to decline the position in Capital City. And soon there would be an eighth coffee and an eleventh coffee, and within a couple months, I would consider Tim my closest friend. I think we even might have been dating for about seventeen minutes, but I’m not sure; in any case, we decidedly landed on friends, and he was the only one I knew was my friend for the sake of being friends, not out of the convenience of attending church or working together. This was probably because he was into relationships—he thought about them a lot and consciously did things to further them. I knew I could count on him calling every couple weeks or so. And I can't be the first to have noticed that when people do things like this, it makes you feel worth knowing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)