At first glace

you look perfect

~

it’s the intricate beauty

that distracts

~

that’s why I see trough you

54. ANGER AS A SPY.—Anger exhausts the soul and brings its very dregs to light. Hence, if we know no other means of gaining certainty, we must understand how to arouse anger in our dependents and adversaries, in order to learn what is really done and thought to our detriment.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too human, Miscellaneous Maxims And Opinions. Translated By Paul V. Cohn, B.A. New York The MacMillan Company 1913, Free license from Gutenberg.org

We all have our ways of interacting with the world, from some small talk with a colleague to a serious conversation with a friend. I know from myself that I can be pretty overbearing, with little patience and understanding for the other. I compensate this fact by being extra nice and attentive but if you want me unfiltered you need to know that I mean no harm.

I remember one day when some friend of a friend showed me her “antique” sword from some far away country. She was visually proud of it and it had a special place on the wall, and she asked me what I thought of it…not so smart… I just started talking, without thinking: this is no special sword, look at the marks and the way the made that, it’s probably not that old either and they used it to hack their way through the jungle or cut a chicken’s head of, cool sward. Well…from then on, I was the asshole from Holland with his big mouth.

Maybe my inability to read faces and social cues is a sign of some unacknowledged autistic tendencies but it is a great help if you take the above aphorism in mind. Luckily, we all get older and I can bite my lip a little easier now but Nietzsche was right, you need to poke in someone’s feelings to find out what they really think (of you). The sward owner was a pretentious hoo-hah the moment I saw her and I new we wouldn’t like each other, and I was right I guess, just needed to poke and see if I was wrong, some people like honesty.