SURROUND BY IDIOTS
INTRODUCTION
I was in high school when I first noticed that I got along better with certain people rather than others. It was easy to talk to some of my friends; in any conversation, we always found the right words and everything just flowed smoothly. There were never any conflicts, and we liked one another. With other people, however, everything just
went wrong. What I said fell on deaf ears, and I couldn’t understand why.
Why was speaking to some people so easy, while others were total blockheads? Since I was young, this certainly wasn’t something
that kept me awake at night. However, I still remember puzzling over why some conversations flowed naturally, while others didn’t even start—no matter how I conducted myself.
It was just incomprehensible. I began using different methods to test people. I
tried to say the same things in similar contexts just to see what reaction I got. Sometimes it worked and an interesting
discussion developed. On other occasions, nothing happened at all.
People just stared at me as if I were from another planet, and sometimes it felt that way. When we’re young, we tend to think of things very simply. Because some people in my circle of friends reacted in a normal way
that meant, of course, that they were automatically the good guys. And so I just assumed there was something wrong with the people who didn’t understand me. What other explanation could there possibly be?
I was the same all the time! Certain people just had
something wrong with them. So I simply began to avoid these weird, difficult people because I didn’t understand them. Call it the naïveté of youth if you will, but it did give rise to some amusing consequences. In later years, however, all of this changed.