Honesty and Friends

It's funny that friends are the people you're supposed to be able to be honest with, when you know that if you were completely honest with them, that'd be you sans friends fairly quickly.

I mean, yeah, you can be honest about all sorts of stuff, but there's always things that people are sensitive about or the foibles and neuroses they have that you have to tiptoe around. There's the things that one friend tells you about another, or when two of your friends don't get on and you have to constantly tiptoe around each one when it comes to the other.

And then of course there's this kind of journal. Am I supposed to be honest here? If I am and my friends read it, they'll be upset, so even here, I'm left censoring myself to avoid offending my friends neuroses.

Of course, I'm sure that if my friends told me the truth about me I'd be offended. Would I be able to take it? I like to think I would be, but when you get down to it, I'm pretty much as human as the next guy.

Maybe what everyone needs is to discuss differences amongst each other in a calm, rational, understanding way. Of course, the last time I tried that I was mostly met with scorn and a general feeling that we shouldn't try and analyse each other, but should just get by on superficial, intuitive feelings about each other, so I guess that that's out too.

It's important to remember that none of us are perfect, and that we're going to occasionally rub each other up the wrong way, and that most of the time I have a great time with my friends. I guess that, realistically speaking, that's the most I can hope for.

And, when you get right down to it, that's good enough for me.

Dave Winer

One of the great things about Journals is the fact that I get to whine about other people...

I was going to say it really annoys me when people tell you their problems but don't want to hear an answer. But it doesn't, it downright confounds me. Sure, sometimes it can be good to rant and just get stuff off your chest, and everyone needs to complain from time to time, but if you've got problems, surely at some point you'll want to actually do something about them?

On his Blog, Dave said:

Here's something really boring. Some spammer is using my email address as the return address on a lot of spam. Result? Thousands of bounces coming back at me, interspersed with spam directed at me. Is email dying?

following on from a general discussion by numerous people online that email was a really bad way of keeping in touch with people. As I find email incredibly useful (if frequently misused) medium, I#'ve thought about this a fair bit and offered some advice. I got this in reply:

Andrew, thanks for the advice. Now in a friendly way, that's likely to do
you more good than the advice you've given me -- sometimes people don't want
the problem solved. Sometimes they just want to share the story, and leave
it at that. This, by the way, for me, is one of those times. Have a nice
day. Dave

Now, I could have understood it if he'd told me my ideas were unworkable due to problem X, or that he didn't have the time to implement them, or whatever. But no, he's just complaining for the sake of it.

Of course, if I was reading this my response would be "Andy, you're just whining for the sake of it." to which I'm sure the response would be "Nope, I have a solution. When I rule the world, all people will be genetically engineered to actually want solutions to their problems. This will cause the dawning of a new age of mankind where people are actually happy."

So there.