Pensive Saturday.

Today was a general clean-up day. Lots of trash made it to the dumpster, the kitty boxes got cleaned again, several loads of laundry were pushed through the machines (I feel like TraumaMama, the Goddess of Laundry), a load of dishes were washed, and filing done with an eye to tax returns. Thank the Powers The Be for H&R Block. There’s no way I want to even think about dealing with last year’s mess.

All this manual labor left my brain free to think, which is usually a dangerous thing. It certainly was today. I find that quantity of thought time means a loss of quality of thought. Ah well.

Yesterday I was challenged by someone to defend a decision I made months ago. It really doesn’t matter what the decision was at this point, or why I decided to act on things a certain way. What bothers me is that this person felt that they had a right to know why I came to this decision. The decision affected them somewhat, so I suppose they felt justified in demanding an explanation. But the information I based the decision on was confidential. Which should win out … right to know, or confidentiality?

In the end, I punted. I explained what I could, leaving out what I couldn’t say. The other person was less than satisfied, and I probably would have done better not to try and justify myself at all. That is a take-home lesson I shall try to remember next time such a situation comes up, if it ever does.

In a related issue (though it may not be obvious how this could be related) I spent some time thinking on how groups of friends form. What is it that makes you want to have one person as a friend, while you want to cross the street and hide in a doorway when you see another person coming your way? Mutual interests, compatible dispositions, the ability to listen and understand, a congenial nature, ability to trust: these are often given as the foundations for friendship. As often as not though you’ll find fast friends who share few of these items. Other times people who seem as though they’d make good friends who despise each other. I’m still pondering this one, but I think that friendship is so interlaced with personal needs that you’d never be able to tease the two apart. And, as no two people have the same identical needs, no two people will have the same basis for what they call friendship.

So for me, I guess friendship is like art. I don’t necesarily know how to define it, but I know it when I see it. And while I’d like all the answers to life, the universe and everything before I die, I figure it’s enough that I know life, the universe and everything when I see it. The rest is just details.

I suppose that’s why Douglas Adams, rest his spirit, correctly arrived at 42 as “the answer to life, the universe and everything”. If the question doesn’t make any sense, neither should the answer.

With that, I think it’s time to go to bed and rest my overtaxed brain cells.