Quadrupled addendum.

One of my other pet peeves when I discuss the woes and misfortunes of my professional trajectory is people who focus on the lack of positivity in my thinking.

Like, when I was recently describing how over the past 15 years I'd repeatedly encountered promising professional situations only to have the rug pulled out from under me at late stages, just multiple, multiple times, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) responded by mildly affirming or at least not disagreeing with what I'd just said, but more importantly by saying that the narrative that you tell yourself is important.

(Uh, yes, it's the narrative that's the problem here...  Conversely when I was having that same conversation with my one [art school] colleague who wears [women's] clothes, he was just like, yep, it's a pattern, since he's known me for a long time and has seen this happen time and time again.)

The same thing happened years ago, too, with this one collegiate scholarship donor in (finance) who I kept in touch with a very little bit by email, when I broached developing systemic economic issues and how ominous they were for class mobility etc., and he more or less was like, "I'm concerned, who are you hanging out with? You need a new set of friends!"

(Yeah, I'm getting fed a bad take on the world from my set of friends -- guess I didn't notice!)

When I encounter stuff like that, I almost want to act like my one (half Sudanese) (half British) friend (the brother of the brother-sister pair), like he does sometimes with his socratic response.

Like, he told me that once someone in (Britain) mentioned to him that many young people were lazy, so he responded by being nice and being all like, "Hmm, that could be true!", and then he asked how many young people they knew, where they were and what they were doing, what about statistics that he read about about home ownership and income, perhaps all those people were lazy, and then, finally, well, there must be a lot of good jobs around, if all these lazy people aren't going after them.

Essentially, his strategy was to affably work with their premise and draw it out to the point of ridiculousness, and by doing that to show them up. "Really, they think an entire generation is lazy?", he was like, "What nonsense."

Quite a dick-ish move, I do think, but it must have had its own satisfactions.