Socializing

I'm a nerd, so it is my responsibility to over think absolutely everything. Today the thing in question will be socializing.

Although you probably don't think of it this way, one of the most important things, if not the most important skill thing in high school is learning social skills. It's kind of a big deal. The silly thing is that how I act has a direct result on pretty much everything in my life. If I act up a lot when Mrs. Flatland is around, then she probably won't think I'm mature enough to get a good part in the next play (in case you are wondering, I've pretty much put aside all thought of getting any half-way decent part in the next play). If I'm super annoying, even more so then I already am, then the natural consequence that I will be less enjoyable to be around. And let's face it, bad things stand out a lot more than good. This isn't anything new, of course. It's mere common sense and probably isn't even worth mentioning.

I think that relationships with friends would get a lot deeper if we could figure out how to deal with annoyances. It seems that we seem to be so focused on not offending or annoying others we miss out on great opportunities. You might think of this silly, but I've actually come up with a system for facebook messaging. If I've been the first one to initiate a conversation with a person several times in a row,  I wait a good amount of time before starting a conversation again, even if the person in question is online and I feel liking talking to them. Actually this is more of an idea that I had and forget to implement because I'm so caught up in the thought of social interaction over the internet, but it shows that I am a little hesitant about bothering people all the time. But then take a person that I am a really, really good friend with: Ryan. With Ryan, if I see him on Facebook I'll message him instantly without a second thought. Why? Because I know Ryan well enough that I know that there is virtually nothing I could do to annoy him. As such, probably the main reason that we've become such good friends is BECAUSE of Facebook chat (so far we've had around 22,500 messages. And that's not counting all the times we've chatted on Gmail either!). Not to use Facebook as another example, but, well, to use Facebook as another example, Facebook wall posts are very similar. There are a few people I know (Ryan, Abby, Allie, Ben etc.) who I write on their walls about anything, even if it is somewhat frivolous. This is because I know that these people enjoy wall posts as much as I do, and they don't consider wall posts spam (unless I go overboard, which I probably have a few times). The point is, I can do one of the most awesome things about Facebook  (writing on people's walls) often because I know that it is very unlikely that they would get annoyed. If we don't have to worry about annoying others, then we can reap much more benefits (in this case, more facebook wall posts!). In case you are wondering, this doesn't mean that I'm not social with other people who I perhaps don't know quite as well. What I'm saying here is that when we don't have to worry as much about discretion, socializing is much more enjoyable.

In case you are wondering, no, I'm not particularly self-conscious when it comes to socializing. In fact, I probably should learn to be a little more so in the future. Actually, the point of this post was to over-analyze something that we probably don't put to much thought into.