In Which a Sense of Proportion could only make Life less Exciting.

You know those people who take things just waaaaaaaaay too personally? You know the ones: good things, bad things, the weather in Paraguay, they secretly believe it all somehow reflects on them, and that their opinion is both relevant and interesting to friends, innocent by-passers, and passengers in their taxi? The types with that specialised flavour of deluded self-absorption who can be offended (or irrationally pleased) by such innocent remarks as “Who are you feeling?”, “I’m so tired”, or “My, I hear that weather they’re having in Paraguay is lovely at present! Wish I was there!”. Yeah, I’m one of them. (Ha, I’m listening to my iPod on shuffle as I type and Ben Folds has just informed me that “she’s so sensitive and shit just happens sometimes”; more from the “music which says something to me about my life” frontier.)

This will not, of course, be news to any of you with whom I have been friends for any length of time. Especially anyone who’s ever lived with me, or been in any way trapped with me for prolonged enough periods that I’ve failed to bother hiding the crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that this could be considered a good thing, and it probably often (maybe not “usually”) is. People who have a healthy sense of proportion don’t get quite so pleased and excited by a nice morning, and don’t feel quite so self-satisfied by the mere knowledge that the cafe on the corner of their block is so highly considered that people drive from suburbs and suburbs away, just to have breakfast there. Those people would think “oh, how lucky we are living near a nice cafe, also, I bet the ocean views that cafe gets sure don’t hurt!” not “Aha! Look! A firetruck is parked outside our cafe, even the firemen on duty go there! Awesome, our cafe is the best, we rule.” Uh, hypothetically.

What I’m saying is that this is not exclusively a problem. The problem lies in forgetting that one is coming from a different place to other people (even if they’re self-absorbed, they’re still not coming from Planet Ang, but rather from their own personal planets). Last week I got all upset by something that had absolutely nothing to do with me. And I don’t mean something of the “8 million babies killed in Burma but I don’t know anyone who lives there” (which would be relevant to everyone in the sense that (a) we’re all people and should be moved by the suffering of other... etc. etc. etc. and (b) Burma is not that far away, and anything that kills that many Burmese babies would be bound to get us eventually) or even the slightly tragic “when Princess Di died, I cried for a week” varieties. I mean like “I had a sudden encroachment of awareness of my own irrelevance and ordinariness when I found out that my ex had joined a Swing Dancing troupe”. Caveat: “irrelevance” to the world of swing dancing. My ex is a nice guy, but I don’t particularly mind being irrelevant to him (although being felt by an ex to be deeply, meaningfully and truly irrelevant is never nice either, really).

It cannot possibly be conceived to be anything whatsoever to do with me, but it really seemed like a slap in the face, somehow. That, my friends, is obviously completely insane. Which was clear every time I tried to explain how I felt to anyone; “he’s joined the #$%^&* troupe! I don’t get to be in the troupe! How dare he?!” I would say, and even my dearest and most understanding friends cocked an inquiring eyebrow and waited for the other shoe to drop, for the part where this in any way impinged on my dancing experience or, as we say in the biz “mattered”. (Heh, I love saying “as we say in the biz” about perfectly ordinary words. Sometimes I forget that it’s actually from that Fry & Laurie sketch, and that most people would more or less figure it denoted being a tosser of the worst calibre.)

This (this thing where I take random things too personally) became particularly obvious to me over the last day or two: I did a fair amount of baking with an oven which has been called “tempestuous” by the kind hearted, and unprintable things by those who are not. Baking is thus marginally more challenging than it might otherwise be. Now, I can’t even remember the name of the girl who, when I made cake for something once, had her young man try a piece first and checked the quality with him (in front of me) before she had any: “Is it moist? I only want some if it’s moist.” I know it’s a little thing, but it seemed so rude at the time that every time I take something out of the oven which I’m baking for a potentially critical audience (which is how I inaccurately categorise my PBL group) I hear her in my head. “Is it moist? I only want some if it’s moist.” Good grief. That’s clearly an innocent inquiry and comment. She hadn’t had any, so it can’t be considered a criticism, I don’t know why it seemed so breathtakingly rude to me. I guess it was just the silliness that struck me. I was sitting right there, what was he going to say? “No, good god, it’s so dry that it’s sucking all the moisture from my body! Pass me a glass of water and stay the hell away from this godawful cake! Get out while you still can!”

Not only do I now worry about the imaginary people criticising things I make (which I’m sure makes me more critical of them than I need to be), this sort of it’s-all-about-me thing also means that I tend to read other people’s life decisions as such as well. This made sense that time a boyfriend toyed with the idea of moving overseas but was surprised when I seemed to feel that this would matter to me. But it doesn’t make sense when friends decide to take up things (or people) which I think (because, hey man, I’d totally know, right?) are bad for them. Sometimes I catch myself actually being annoyed with my siblings for their adult decisions which in no way affect me. Maybe it’s always going to be worse with siblings, who knows?

I guess this all goes hand-in hand with the tendency to overthink things people say to you. Criticisms are not something I’ve ever particularly come to relish. Apparently you’re supposed to treasure the opportunity to use feedback to improve yourself or something, but I pretty much tend to get defensive and fail to appreciate it. Did you ever hear that song by a guy called Quindon Tarver, which was in the Triple J hottest 100 in about 1998? It was called “Everybody’s Free (to wear sunscreen)” and it was essentially a spoken address to a graduating class, advice of various types, set to a background of that song about how “everybody’s free to feel good” or whatever. No? Well, check it out some day. In it, there was a piece of advice which I really remember: “Remember compliments you receive, forget the insults. If you manage this, tell me how.” (Or, y’know, words to that effect. Apparently “really remember” was a trifle hyperbolic.) I’ve always figured that a sort of step-wise approach to this was the way to go, so while forgetting insults remains an elusive dream, I tend to really hoard and treasure compliments.

The problem with this is the same problem you always get when you horde and treasure things; you raise your own standards and want to classify things according to quality. This sort of defeats the purpose, a smidgin. Because when someone says “ooh, you look nice today” a tiny part of me (the part that’s not busy going “gawsh” and twirling it’s toe metaphorically in the dirt in a pleased, bashful sort of way) (so really quite a tiny, tiny part) thinks “why ‘today’? Do I not usually? Am I overdressed?”. I’m almost sure that I’m getting worse about this recently, but maybe I’m just noticing more due to the comparative turmoil of the last 12 months.

Maybe all this introspective blogging is just doing what navel-gazing always does, sending me slowly, but surely, completely mad. It could very well be that. (Also, I apologise for the weakness of this post, I was building to something before, but I had to cut it, so it sort of peters out a little bit. Next time, Gadget, next time, I shall write something with some good honest structure, honest.)