Here’s some food for thought.
I have an artist friend who looks at the world in very interesting ways. He had some advice for dealing with someone who is saying something that gets on your nerves that was actually passed on to me by a mutual friend.
He said, since people are always telling him that their dog seems to know that they’re thinking
and understand what they’re saying, that it’s almost as if it can talk. And, he wondered; what if their dog really could talk? It wouldn’t matter what it said, or how dumb it was, it would be so amazing that your dog was speaking that you’d listen in rapt fascination. So he takes that approach when he’s talking to people that are trying his nerves. He just says to himself, “Look, that animal can talk, that’s AMAZING!!!!” Try it sometime. It really does work amazingly well. If nothing else, it makes me smile enough to distract me from how annoying the speaker is to me.
Incidentally, that was the front man for Culturcide, who now does very unusual, process-oriented art with paint and lace that is very popular with a certain culture-obsessed set in Houston. He’s an interesting guy with an obviously interesting way of seeing the world.
Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing."
--Kingsley Amis
