But how does this affect me, Al Franken?

Inspired by some comments by both Astrobarry and Mystic Medusa in horoscopes about a month ago, I have been reassessing the way I interact with friends. I don't know if this is right, but I'm trying it out as a mental stance.

My new attitude is, I don't want to keep people around in my life who just drain me and make me feel guilty. It's important that when I have people in my life I am getting something from them.

Is this wrong? You will be thinking, this is why I am so lonely right now, because I've become a selfish rat bastard and have forgotten how to give.

Well, yes, okay, but in some ways I think it's a good stance too. It's based in the horrendous experiences I had when I was moving. Everyone, everyone acted just abominably, hysterical, demanding, pouring out their pain onto me and making me listen to them, and they didn't help me at all, one single bit, in my very difficult thing that I was doing. (With the exception of my ex, which is now just confusing.) Total strangers insisted that I meet them for lunch and then they told me their dark, horrible, painful secrets, and didn't at all want to listen to mine - I still have no idea why this happened. Australians never pour out painful personal secrets, ever, because it's considered a burden to the other person to hear them, but since I was leaving the country I suppose they thought I was okay to use as a confessor because I'd be gone and wouldn't come back. But it was horrendous, and has left me feeling battered and traumatised.

When I got here I had all those communication difficulties, and I still haven't got a reliable and easy-to-use phone card for calling Aussie people. And they never call me. And I feel like I should call them, especially the ones who sent me nice Christmas presents, but my feeling is based in guilt more than in appreciation of their company.

Are you obliged to call your "friends" because of how much they like you and the pleasure it would bring to them to hear from you, or is it better to weed people out of your life who you only contact out of guilt and you don't get that much from?

I'm trying to use the same rubric for activities. If I feel I should do something from some stereotype or social pressure or past vision of myself, that's not good enough, the thing has to actually contribute to something of value in my life right now. Like dishes. Dishes never contribute to some positive goal, it's maintenance only, there's always a better way of spending one's time than doing dishes, so they go to the bottom of the list, frequently, and get done only when they start to smell or I'm out of knives or somebody's coming to visit. And decorating. I feel like I should have great taste and vision and be able to choose furniture and arrange it in my place when my stuff comes, but I'm realising that I'm really bad at three-dimensional spacial things, and I'm actually thinking of hiring a decorator and just letting them do it. And writing a novel. I think I have an old belief that I should write a novel, but in fact it may not contribute to anything I want to accomplish in my life in the long term, so maybe it's not something to feel guilty about at all.

Careful readers, are you at this moment spotting the contradiction between this post and the anniversary post below where I claimed to have no goals at all in my life? Okay, well done, you spotted that I did actually make a list of goals yesterday when I was out having lunch post-haircut, and used it to evaluate my to do list. The goals I came up with were:

* hedons (this is a term from utilitarian ethical theory in philosophy, it's a hypothetical measure of a unit of pleasure)
* partner
* money
* community (that is, becoming more connected to my community which is Appleton)
* 85 (this is an abbreviation of "When you imagine yourself at age 85 and look back over you life, what do you want your life to have been like?" This is an exercise I got years ago from a time management book, and I use it because I kind of do have a pretty clear view of what kind of 85 year old lady I want to be.)

Things like doing dishes fall into "basic maintenance" and so have to be done as a baseline but don't contribute to any particular goal any more than to any other. Which is probably why I'm having trouble getting myself to the gym - although that does get a bit of extra credit in the "partner" column.

More on the to do list later, but on friends, if the friends don't contribute to my life or goals at the moment, but I'm only sustaining them out of guilt and about how much it means to them, not me, should I keep that friend at all? You have to have some friends, and I'm a bit short on them at the moment, but which ones should I put energy into? Is it okay to just drop all the Sydney ones, since I moved 10,000 miles away from them anyway? Or am I just being selfish and lazy? Or is it okay because I was traumatised and I have to hole up and bunker down and heal for a little while?

New friends are kind of getting this metric as well - I've met two different people who have close relatives who are very, very, very sick with cancer. I have dropped them off the the potential new friends list. I don't have any resources to help someone through something that awful, right now. I have my own trauma. I need someone happy and strong, in a positive and easy space in their own life, so I can lean on them, and gain energy, and have them help me heal and get established here. Is that so wrong?

Probably. I'll probably go to hell and in the meantime be cursed with permanent loneliness. But these are my current lines of thinking, so if you guys have any thoughts you can put them in the comments. And if I don't write back you know it's because I think you're a boring, draining, selfish bore! Right? No, not at all.

Dear me, maybe I should just hit "delete" on this one.