Sunday September 14, 2014
I wonder what it would feel like to fall to the far right, or somewhere in the middle, of the introvert-extravert continuum. What would it be like to be a total extravert with a zillion shallow friendships and the need to be around other people to get energy? What would it be like to fall in the middle and want to be around people sometimes but not others? As a pretty extreme introvert, I wonder what it would be like to live in someone else’s extraverted shoes for a day. Maybe extraverts don’t find friendships as disappointing as often as I do. Maybe, because their energies and relationships are spread over so many more people, they don’t have as much invested in individual relationships as I do. Sometimes, when people let me down, I just think, “why do I even bother”?
Yesterday, after I took a shower and felt all nice and non-grubby again, I got on wifi and checked my email. I saw an email from my friend Wayne from two days ago saying he hopes it’s not too late, but he can’t come up to Walden Saturday. He has double-booked himself and can’t get out of his other commitments. Crap. I double-checked that everything was still good and gave him an option to say ‘too hard’ when I was in Cody, before I booked a room for two nights. I knew it would be a huge gamble to just show up in Walden in hunting season and hope for a room. At that time, he reassured me that he would make it, it would just be late. So now, here I am in Walden, for no reason.
I’m disappointed for several reasons. First, I was looking forward to seeing a friend for the first time since June. Second, I would not have come through Walden if I’d known we weren’t meeting. I would have gone over the Snowys, the opposite direction to last year, to do more hiking. Or I would have gone around and over on 230 to try a new route. Either way, I would have gone through Laramie and ridden into Ft Collins on 287. Third, there is absolutely nothing to do in Walden on a Sunday in September. What a waste of time!
It is very rare for me not to be able to find some good in every less-than-desirable situation. And today I find some good in the television. Since my nose goes nuts each time I step outside, I only venture out to get more food at the Family Dollar. Then I spend the rest of the day reading, writing and watching TV. This is how I rediscover that September is a great time to watch a variety of sports. There are play-off games for baseball, and there are pre-season games for football and ice hockey. I don’t get to see any of those back in Australia, so it is a nice treat to flick between several sports of the North American variety. It’s cold and windy today, so maybe it wouldn’t have been all that much fun to be hiking the high peaks of the Snowys anyway.