Human Behavior

If asked, my friends would say that I am more often logical than not. Annoyingly so, in fact.

I’m not saying that I am more highly evolved, I’m just saying that in some cases, my left brain rules my actions than my right. Which is a good thing in some cases, and bad in others.

However, that doesn’t really exempt me from making stupid, impulsive decisions that, for my part, I don’t regret but I do regret the affect it would have on the people around me.  

Having said that, this part of myself does make it impossible to understand some aspects of the human behavior, one of those aspects are, for a lack of a better word: pettiness.

Don’t get me wrong, I can be as petty as the next person, for instance, I find people who want to visit my home as an intrusion. When I don’t feel like it, I don’t even want my friends around me. I don’t like it when people just assume they can share my time or my space. If someone does me wrong, I would forgive them but I would never forget. If someone hurts the people I love, I would easily cut them off from my life as taking out the trash. 

Your boyfriend cheats on you. Okay, you break it off with him, maybe punch him in the face a little. MOVE ON. You don’t stalk the woman he cheats on you with, threaten or call her in the middle of the night or say that you’re going to kill yourself. If you want to do something like that, and you have no pride to spare, do that him because he’s the one that you should blame. 

Your neighbor doesn’t return your ladder/lawnmower/whatever—you don’t start a feud because of it, I mean seriously.

Your best friend couldn’t come to your birthday—maybe they had better things to do. You don’t cut them out of your life because of that. You don’t let something like that erase years of friendship and history.

You walk into a bad romance (getting it on with a friend’s significant other, having an affair with a married person) knowingly and when things go bad, you blame everyone and their mother—which is just mind-bogglingly stupid because it’s your own damn pathetic fault—and then act out toward others like they did you wrong.

I mean, everyone deserves to have some revenge once or twice in their life…but don’t make it your life’s ambition to hurt other people (and yourself) just because of hurt feelings. If someone murdered your whole family and escaped justice, now that I get. But the kind of pettiness, the one that is usually born out of some slight either imaginary or real, that I don’t understand…because it doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t give you anything but pity or ridicule. It doesn’t make things better, it doesn’t change things for the better either. 

And by doing so, you’re only hurting yourself and the people who love you.