Environment, Part II:

I may (or may not) have mentioned in a previous post that I'm a waitress. 

There are a lot of really witty people in the service industry.  There are also a lot of very dramatic people--consider how many servers eventually plan to be actors!  I may have some evidence, here. 

This is not a slam against servers, because servers are some of the most entertaining, fun-loving people around.  There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but I generally find them to be more genial, more accepting, more sympathetic, and more generous than, as it were, the average bear.  They're scintillating.

But holy cats, they sure aren't restful!  If I'm looking for restful, I turn to my other friends: the ones who can spend an afternoon hanging out and cuddling, and count it a good afternoon; the ones who come over and we bake cookies all night.  The ones who can sit on the couch with me for three hours without either of us speaking a word, and it was a good three hours. 

It's a question of style, really. 

Some people, you walk into their house or dorm room or whatever, and you see something essentially clean, but covered with knick-knacks, like little boxes or chests or statues, and there are five of them on every square foot of surface. 

Some people, you walk into their house and there is precisely one object on the coffee table, placed precisely in the center, and that object is a coaster. 

And the people with all those knick-knacks think the coaster-person is depressing and spartan, while the coaster-person thinks the knick-knack guy is claustrophobic and also crazy.  Like the Odd Couple, right?

I freely admit, I'm more inclined to be a coaster-person.  (And again, I'll emphasize that it's a question of style, not superiority.  I can't say that enough!)  My point here is that the observation applies in a more-than-literal sense.

I didn't realize that it was bad for me to spend too much time around people who are more inclined to witty flippancy than ponderous profundity (and I hope I have managed to highlight both the advantages and disadvantages of each) until I got home from hanging out with a group of such people and realized I was exhausted, shaky, and meepish.  And then I thought back over the night, and realized I'd spent half of it either saying or wanting to say, "Slow down!" 

This reaction was not entirely reasonable.  After all, everybody was having fun going really really fast, right?  And it's not like this was news; they've always been somewhat... exhilarating?  It's just, this really isn't new, and I've encountered this feeling before, and always before it has led to me drawing back and retreating.  I have two really good reasons for not wanting to do that this time: 

Number one, in specific:  because I really like these people, and drawing back will mean severing ties with them... which I don't want to do.   Number two, in general:  I am done retreating.  I am retreated out.  Retreat is one of my first instincts, the product of a therapy-inducing childhood, and half the time said retreat is bad for me.  (And, almost all the time, it's bad for my reputation; how many retreats have historically been well-respected?) 

So I know that these people (whom I genuinely like) constitute, not a bad, but certainly a frenzied environment, and I know that a calm environment is important to my mental health; but I'm also not willing to abandon them just because of a little frenzy! 

It is, as Yul Brynner would say, a puzzlement.