lagusta.com - diary of a failed friendship

Diary of a failed friendship

For another story of a failed friendship, see the essay on not shaving.

For another perspective on hatred, see the essay on hatred. You will notice that this essay conveys much of the same information as the hatred one. I wrote this essay last year and forgot about it, and in the meantime the other one emerged. I guess it was my year to sort out my feelings on the black emotions.

Once in a while, usually in social situations where I am politely declining various substances, someone will remark that I am ridiculously pure. I know how it could seem that way to them – I don’t know how to smoke, my parents’ excessive drug use gave me practically no interest in them, I drink whiskey in girly sips, the vegan thing, etc. “Don’t worry,” I always say. “I have one vice that’s worse than all those things: I am really into hatred.”

There is one vice I do own and it is truly a vice in the sense that I regularly feed it, I care for it, I love and grow it against the advice of practically everyone. Everyone agrees that it is a terrible trait and the more I feed it the more it will take over my life. It is something shameful and something to be worked on, but I do not work on it and I’m not particularly ashamed of it. It is the one way I have let the horrible world into the deepest parts of my heart.

I have a finely honed and precisely calibrated sense of vitriolic hatred, brilliant and hard as a diamond, living in a special place in my heart, and I refuse to give it up.

I think about it all the time. Why can’t I let go of it? My heart is crisscrossed with lines in the sand and when something or someone crosses them, there is no going back. For convenience’ sake, I wish I was a kinder, gentler person. I wish I could “live and let live.” But my political view of the world is such that when you see the

truth about the world, as I am always diligently trying to do, you can no longer stand to be around those who are either not trying to see the truth, or, worse, who see the truth, or parts of it, but don’t let it affect their lives.

It’s not that I think I know better than everyone. That’s what everyone thinks, and that’s even what I say when I’m really angry, but that’s really not it. It’s just that I care more than most people. I guess that’s no less egotistical, but I’ve been around and around it, and that’s it. I have certain views, but I do listen to other’s views – if they have them. Most people have no political views at all – really! Talk to them – you’ll see. It sickens me. In order to survive, in order to pay the mortgage, pay for the wedding, raise the fucking kids, compromises have to be made. I drive a non-hybrid car, I live in a non-solar-powered house. I fly on planes and I am not as educated as I should be about my local political candidates. But I run a little vegan business in an environmentally-friendly way. I drive and fly as little as possible. I eat locally and don’t buy new clothes and I would never set foot in Wal-Mart or Starbucks. I do what I can. And I’d say 80% of people aren’t doing anything. So I’m angry, and I clutch this anger to me like a badge: I’ve earned it by refusing to close my eyes.

A friend (P., mentioned below) recently told me that I think of myself as doing the best I can in my life, and the way to get over my feelings of superiority towards others is to see that others see themselves as doing the best they can as well. Around the time of the 2004 election, when Jacob and I went to Pennsylvania to work with MoveOn.org to try to get people to vote for that-man-we-hate-slightly-less-than-Bush, I tried that. The part of Pennsylvania we were in is one of those terrifying American places where sweat pants are mandatory attire for all functions, churches are where all functions take place, and everyone has some sort of infuriating ribbon magnet on their car. While I spoke with Bush supporters, I tried to tell myself that deep down we all want the same things: a safe country. A healthy family. Enough money to survive. Love. The reason this kumbaya argument broke down was that people (especially working class and/or middle class people and/or minorities and/or lesbians or gays and/or women) who voted for Bush are so totally complicit in their own oppression and apparently so ignorant of that fact that I found it hard to even look at them.

As my many enemies and former friends will attest, I am not an especially smart person. Yet I have managed to figure out that Bush = death, so why can’t the rest of the country? The reason I hate so much of America is that so many people cling on to their ignorance. This is unacceptable.

If I am this way, which I most decidedly am, why can’t I just be this way and acknowledge it, but not spend so much time polishing the hatred it engenders and directing it at those whose lives differ from mine? Why not just live my tiny happy life? I don’t know.

I guess most would say this is a worse vice to hold on to than smoking or drinking. Drinking all the time dulls the pain of the world. Using your anger at the world as a white-hot poker with which you repeatedly stab yourself in the eye seems somewhat more damaging.

We all have our own particular way of adding evil to the world. Some people work for Viacom and buy all their clothes at the Gap and go to dinner with “the gals” at Chili’s and order from the “pastabilities” section of the menu. Some people run sweatshops and child porn rings. Some people go on fertility drugs to have a baby instead of adopting. Some people watch movies with their mouths open. I have a wonderful and ethical life, but I have this little side project: hatred. It’s just my thing. It works for me most of the time.

But I recently lost a friend because of it and I can’t quite get over it.

* * *

I made truffles this weekend, and I have 2 extra boxes. Usually I give the boxes to friends. I have no close friends up here. The boxes sit in my fridge as a reminder of my failure to cultivate friendships. It's not that I'm not likable, it's mostly because I’m just not that into friends. I have my long-distance friends, I have my partner. Sometimes I crave a friend like one of my long distance friends who lived close by, who could come over to watch movies or for dinner, but I’m too busy and harsh to cultivate surface friends. If someone is going to come over to my house for dinner, I need to be able to talk about Supreme Court nominations and solar houses with them. How do we ever become close to people?

Maybe it’s not in my genes. My mother is the same way I am. She sits at home and writes novels, plays with her cats, does her animal rights work. Friends, she says, are so tiring. We both have a concept of “work” – a life work, a craft – that is much more satisfying to us than a social life. When I visit Jacob on tour I drink and I socialize until I get weirded out by the strangeness of the touring muscian world and retreat, and that’s fine. But I need to start finding friends in my quiet little mountain town.

I tried. Early this summer I became good friends with a couple in my town, let’s call them P and J. They are fascinating, energetic, friendly people, with excellent views on food politics and an excitement about life that makes it fun to be around them. We started spending a lot of time together, so much so that we called it our “honeymoon.” We kept wondering when we would get tired of each other. I once warned them that we shouldn’t talk about politics too much, because I get hotheaded and tend to lose friends that way, and I really didn’t want to lose their friendship. One day P came over for dinner without his wife J. We started talking about our relationships with our partners, and about male-female relationships, and in the interests of protecting the guilty (him) I won't reveal all the details, but it devolved into a 3-week-long screaming

match – over email, over the phone, and in person – about feminism, my negativity/hatred of humanity, and classism. He and I could not agree, and we could not agree to disagree. We were not particularly nice, we were not kind (we tried and pretended to be, though, it must be said), we were not productive. As we argued, I began to see that a lot of things I had taken for granted that every “good liberal” man would know he (and probably most “good liberal” men) didn’t have a clue about. He began to see me as a simplistic, shrill, white, middle class, western woman, arguing from her position of privilege about things she knew nothing about in the real world. (I know I’m not putting words in his mouth because this is what he said.)

Phew. It is very decadent for two good liberals to argue over the meaning of words and what philosophies mean when we both know that about 80% of the time we agree on the thing underneath the philosophies and the words: people should be treated fairly in this world, and they aren’t.

We knew that we agreed on these basic things, but the arguing itself, the things we revealed to each other about how we live our lives and what viewpoints are the backbone of our beliefs, created a huge rift between us.

I still think he’s a great guy in many ways. I also think he thinks he’s a great guy way too much, and this allows him to be patronizing and (there’s no other word for it, a female P could never exist:) patriarchal. But it seems the friendship is pretty much over. When I look at him now, my heart just sits in my stomach, like a stone. Dead weight. Grief.

Usually, I lose a friend and never look back. But I really, really liked spending time with P and J. I really liked them and respected them as people before we got too deep. I was trying to warn myself the whole time that I shouldn’t get too deep with them, I shouldn’t reveal too much of myself. But the desire to lay your entire heart out in front of your friends is strong, and I forgot that people who are fun to be with might not feel the same way I do about the need to identify as a feminist, and the latter might infect the former, and we might never have fun together again.

So, this is my vice. I am a deeply hard person. I try to coat my hardness with a soft coating, because it’s not pleasant to be hard all the time. I’m not sure if hard people create positive change in the world. I know that people I admire like Gandhi were absolutely not hard. But perhaps there is more than one way to bring about change in the world? It seems that my philosophy of

being hard drives off and closes people off to my other sparking traits and beliefs, but I still believe there is a place for it in the world.

One of the things P and I argued about was whether my way of living is in any way positive, and I was trying to tell P my idea that I need to be farther over to one side than everyone else, so that there is a little space for those in the middle to move over. I was trying to tell him how many emails I get from people who tell me they like lagusta.com, how many friends are vegan because of me, all the little victories it’s not polite to brag about.

Incidentally, P is doing excellent things in his profession, really changing things in a way that is truly revolutionary in the best sense of the world. One of the things that keeps him going, I began to see, is his sense that what he does is right and good. That’s fine, but that ego kept him from seeing the validity of my position. Now, I realize that after all my talk about my hardness, you could say the exact same thing about me. My belief that I am right probably prevents me from seeing other people’s positions all the time, right? I don’t think so. One can believe they are right while still listening to others but those others have to prove themselves worthy of being listened to. There’s no way I’m

going to listen to anyone who drives a Hummer – they have made a choice, and the act of choosing has changed them. In the very beginning P proved himself to me, and I proved myself to him. He is also choosy about his friends, and I felt good to be admitted. But in the end we didn’t have enough gut beliefs in common to keep it going, and we entered the realm of tragedy.

The last episode of our grand fight was that I literally screamed to him that I couldn’t be friends with him until he changed as a person. Not until we both calmed down: until he changed. I felt that the way he was fighting was increasingly insulting to me, and that fact in and of itself proved my point about feminism: women are literally not listened to. He was very quiet, in a way I’d never seen him.

In a couple weeks I realized that the reason this dissolving friendship was giving me such grief was because I had opened my heart up to them and had hoped we could be friends forever, real get-old-together type friends. I was extremely sad that this was never going to happen until I realized that that was never the case – I just thought it was. What came out during out fights wasn’t something I brought out, it was something that was there that just came out because it had always existed – we would never have been the kind of friends I thought we were going to be. It was a

problem with my perception of reality, not a gift I had been given but thoughtlessly smashed.

But I still grieve.

Are things like this just going to keep on happening to me forever? Should I just get over it? Every time I come to my two wise older best friends/mentors with a story like this and the same questions, they just say, “probably” and “yep.” They say it’s the consequence of living in an honest way. They also think I should learn how to be friends with people without exposing them to my entire heart, lest they snap it in half. I’ve never had casual friendships. I always throw my whole heart into my friendships, and I don’t quite know how not to do that. But I better learn, because to get rid of my anger would be such a violent, lobotomizing change that I wouldn’t be me.

Maybe eventually P and J will become good casual friends of mine, when I finally learn how to have casual friends. Maybe slowly I am learning that if the price of hatred, anger, and maybe even losing interesting friends once in a while is clarity of vision, honesty, and the ability to see the world as it is, in all its heart-wrenching sadnesses, I should take it.

It’s my only vice, after all.

Diary of a failed friendship For another story of a failed friendship, see the essay on not shaving. For another perspective on hatred, see the essay on hatred. You will notice that this essay conveys much of the same information as the hatred one. I wrote this essay last year and forgot about it, and in the meantime the other one emerged. I guess it was my year to sort out my feelings on the black emotions.	Once in a while, usually in social situations where I am politely declining various substances, someone will remark that I am ridiculously pure. I know how it could seem that way to them – I don’t know how to smoke, my parents’ excessive drug use gave me practically no interest in them, I drink whiskey in girly sips, the vegan thing, etc. “Don’t worry,” I always say. “I have one vice that’s worse than all those things: I am really into hatred.” There is one vice I do own and it is truly a vice in the sense that I regularly feed it, I care for it, I love and grow it against the advice of practically everyone. Everyone agrees that it is a terrible trait and the more I feed it the more it will take over my life. It is something shameful and something to be worked on, but I do not work on it and I’m not particularly ashamed of it. It is the one way I have let the horrible world into the deepest parts of my heart. I have a finely honed and precisely calibrated sense of vitriolic hatred, brilliant and hard as a diamond, living in a special place in my heart, and I refuse to give it up. I think about it all the time. Why can’t I let go of it? My heart is crisscrossed with lines in the sand and when something or someone crosses them, there is no going back. For convenience’ sake, I wish I was a kinder, gentler person. I wish I could “live and let live.” But my political view of the world is such that when you see the
truth about the world, as I am always diligently trying to do, you can no longer stand to be around those who are either not trying to see the truth, or, worse, who see the truth, or parts of it, but don’t let it affect their lives. It’s not that I think I know better than everyone. That’s what everyone thinks, and that’s even what I say when I’m really angry, but that’s really not it. It’s just that I care more than most people. I guess that’s no less egotistical, but I’ve been around and around it, and that’s it. I have certain views, but I do listen to other’s views – if they have them. Most people have no political views at all – really! Talk to them – you’ll see. It sickens me. In order to survive, in order to pay the mortgage, pay for the wedding, raise the fucking kids, compromises have to be made. I drive a non-hybrid car, I live in a non-solar-powered house. I fly on planes and I am not as educated as I should be about my local political candidates. But I run a little vegan business in an environmentally-friendly way. I drive and fly as little as possible. I eat locally and don’t buy new clothes and I would never set foot in Wal-Mart or Starbucks. I do what I can. And I’d say 80% of people aren’t doing anything. So I’m angry, and I clutch this anger to me like a badge: I’ve earned it by refusing to close my eyes.	A friend (P., mentioned below) recently told me that I think of myself as doing the best I can in my life, and the way to get over my feelings of superiority towards others is to see that others see themselves as doing the best they can as well. Around the time of the 2004 election, when Jacob and I went to Pennsylvania to work with MoveOn.org to try to get people to vote for that-man-we-hate-slightly-less-than-Bush, I tried that. The part of Pennsylvania we were in is one of those terrifying American places where sweat pants are mandatory attire for all functions, churches are where all functions take place, and everyone has some sort of infuriating ribbon magnet on their car. While I spoke with Bush supporters, I tried to tell myself that deep down we all want the same things: a safe country. A healthy family. Enough money to survive. Love. The reason this kumbaya argument broke down was that people (especially working class and/or middle class people and/or minorities and/or lesbians or gays and/or women) who voted for Bush are so totally complicit in their own oppression and apparently so ignorant of that fact that I found it hard to even look at them. As my many enemies and former friends will attest, I am not an especially smart person. Yet I have managed to figure out that Bush = death, so why can’t the rest of the country? The reason I hate so much of America is that so many people cling on to their ignorance. This is unacceptable.
If I am this way, which I most decidedly am, why can’t I just be this way and acknowledge it, but not spend so much time polishing the hatred it engenders and directing it at those whose lives differ from mine? Why not just live my tiny happy life? I don’t know. I guess most would say this is a worse vice to hold on to than smoking or drinking. Drinking all the time dulls the pain of the world. Using your anger at the world as a white-hot poker with which you repeatedly stab yourself in the eye seems somewhat more damaging. We all have our own particular way of adding evil to the world. Some people work for Viacom and buy all their clothes at the Gap and go to dinner with “the gals” at Chili’s and order from the “pastabilities” section of the menu. Some people run sweatshops and child porn rings. Some people go on fertility drugs to have a baby instead of adopting. Some people watch movies with their mouths open. I have a wonderful and ethical life, but I have this little side project: hatred. It’s just my thing. It works for me most of the time. But I recently lost a friend because of it and I can’t quite get over it. * * *	I made truffles this weekend, and I have 2 extra boxes. Usually I give the boxes to friends. I have no close friends up here. The boxes sit in my fridge as a reminder of my failure to cultivate friendships. It's not that I'm not likable, it's mostly because I’m just not that into friends. I have my long-distance friends, I have my partner. Sometimes I crave a friend like one of my long distance friends who lived close by, who could come over to watch movies or for dinner, but I’m too busy and harsh to cultivate surface friends. If someone is going to come over to my house for dinner, I need to be able to talk about Supreme Court nominations and solar houses with them. How do we ever become close to people?
Maybe it’s not in my genes. My mother is the same way I am. She sits at home and writes novels, plays with her cats, does her animal rights work. Friends, she says, are so tiring. We both have a concept of “work” – a life work, a craft – that is much more satisfying to us than a social life. When I visit Jacob on tour I drink and I socialize until I get weirded out by the strangeness of the touring muscian world and retreat, and that’s fine. But I need to start finding friends in my quiet little mountain town. I tried. Early this summer I became good friends with a couple in my town, let’s call them P and J. They are fascinating, energetic, friendly people, with excellent views on food politics and an excitement about life that makes it fun to be around them. We started spending a lot of time together, so much so that we called it our “honeymoon.” We kept wondering when we would get tired of each other. I once warned them that we shouldn’t talk about politics too much, because I get hotheaded and tend to lose friends that way, and I really didn’t want to lose their friendship. One day P came over for dinner without his wife J. We started talking about our relationships with our partners, and about male-female relationships, and in the interests of protecting the guilty (him) I won't reveal all the details, but it devolved into a 3-week-long screaming	match – over email, over the phone, and in person – about feminism, my negativity/hatred of humanity, and classism. He and I could not agree, and we could not agree to disagree. We were not particularly nice, we were not kind (we tried and pretended to be, though, it must be said), we were not productive. As we argued, I began to see that a lot of things I had taken for granted that every “good liberal” man would know he (and probably most “good liberal” men) didn’t have a clue about. He began to see me as a simplistic, shrill, white, middle class, western woman, arguing from her position of privilege about things she knew nothing about in the real world. (I know I’m not putting words in his mouth because this is what he said.) Phew. It is very decadent for two good liberals to argue over the meaning of words and what philosophies mean when we both know that about 80% of the time we agree on the thing underneath the philosophies and the words: people should be treated fairly in this world, and they aren’t. We knew that we agreed on these basic things, but the arguing itself, the things we revealed to each other about how we live our lives and what viewpoints are the backbone of our beliefs, created a huge rift between us.
	I still think he’s a great guy in many ways. I also think he thinks he’s a great guy way too much, and this allows him to be patronizing and (there’s no other word for it, a female P could never exist:) patriarchal. But it seems the friendship is pretty much over. When I look at him now, my heart just sits in my stomach, like a stone. Dead weight. Grief. Usually, I lose a friend and never look back. But I really, really liked spending time with P and J. I really liked them and respected them as people before we got too deep. I was trying to warn myself the whole time that I shouldn’t get too deep with them, I shouldn’t reveal too much of myself. But the desire to lay your entire heart out in front of your friends is strong, and I forgot that people who are fun to be with might not feel the same way I do about the need to identify as a feminist, and the latter might infect the former, and we might never have fun together again. So, this is my vice. I am a deeply hard person. I try to coat my hardness with a soft coating, because it’s not pleasant to be hard all the time. I’m not sure if hard people create positive change in the world. I know that people I admire like Gandhi were absolutely not hard. But perhaps there is more than one way to bring about change in the world? It seems that my philosophy of
	being hard drives off and closes people off to my other sparking traits and beliefs, but I still believe there is a place for it in the world. One of the things P and I argued about was whether my way of living is in any way positive, and I was trying to tell P my idea that I need to be farther over to one side than everyone else, so that there is a little space for those in the middle to move over. I was trying to tell him how many emails I get from people who tell me they like lagusta.com, how many friends are vegan because of me, all the little victories it’s not polite to brag about. Incidentally, P is doing excellent things in his profession, really changing things in a way that is truly revolutionary in the best sense of the world. One of the things that keeps him going, I began to see, is his sense that what he does is right and good. That’s fine, but that ego kept him from seeing the validity of my position. Now, I realize that after all my talk about my hardness, you could say the exact same thing about me. My belief that I am right probably prevents me from seeing other people’s positions all the time, right? I don’t think so. One can believe they are right while still listening to others but those others have to prove themselves worthy of being listened to. There’s no way I’m
going to listen to anyone who drives a Hummer – they have made a choice, and the act of choosing has changed them. In the very beginning P proved himself to me, and I proved myself to him. He is also choosy about his friends, and I felt good to be admitted. But in the end we didn’t have enough gut beliefs in common to keep it going, and we entered the realm of tragedy. The last episode of our grand fight was that I literally screamed to him that I couldn’t be friends with him until he changed as a person. Not until we both calmed down: until he changed. I felt that the way he was fighting was increasingly insulting to me, and that fact in and of itself proved my point about feminism: women are literally not listened to. He was very quiet, in a way I’d never seen him. In a couple weeks I realized that the reason this dissolving friendship was giving me such grief was because I had opened my heart up to them and had hoped we could be friends forever, real get-old-together type friends. I was extremely sad that this was never going to happen until I realized that that was never the case – I just thought it was. What came out during out fights wasn’t something I brought out, it was something that was there that just came out because it had always existed – we would never have been the kind of friends I thought we were going to be. It was a	problem with my perception of reality, not a gift I had been given but thoughtlessly smashed. But I still grieve. Are things like this just going to keep on happening to me forever? Should I just get over it? Every time I come to my two wise older best friends/mentors with a story like this and the same questions, they just say, “probably” and “yep.” They say it’s the consequence of living in an honest way. They also think I should learn how to be friends with people without exposing them to my entire heart, lest they snap it in half. I’ve never had casual friendships. I always throw my whole heart into my friendships, and I don’t quite know how not to do that. But I better learn, because to get rid of my anger would be such a violent, lobotomizing change that I wouldn’t be me. Maybe eventually P and J will become good casual friends of mine, when I finally learn how to have casual friends. Maybe slowly I am learning that if the price of hatred, anger, and maybe even losing interesting friends once in a while is clarity of vision, honesty, and the ability to see the world as it is, in all its heart-wrenching sadnesses, I should take it. It’s my only vice, after all.