on wounding and being wounded

They say true friends are the ones who will wound you when you need wounded. The ones who will slap you around when you need slapped around. I have a few friends whom I am close to who will always tell me when I'm doing something wrong or being a jerk. A few friends who will just tell me what I need to hear when it's not what I want to hear. And I've always been fine with that. But when it comes to the point where I need to tell someone what they need to hear and don't want to hear, that's a different story. I care too much about hurting peoples' feelings. Maybe that's it. Or making them mad at me. I don't know. Today I told one of my best friends something she needed to hear, and now there's a great awkwardness between us. It'll fade, I'm sure of that. I just hate these initial moments. When she says, "That's what I needed to hear," but she's upset at the same time--either because you said it or because of what you said. I don't like it.

Yesterday I went down to Cincinnati and hung out with my friend Amos. We went to The Anchor Grill and smoked our pipes, and then we went to the school and walked around and spotted a few students we knew and hung out with them for a bit. We went to the grocery then to the Lehman house and fixed some good eats. We went back to his place and watched TV, and then I went back to the Lehman house to hang out with my sister and Sarah for an hour before heading home. Now I'm back in the groove of applying for jobs and figuring out what--or, rather, trying to figure out--what I want to do with my life. The confusion and mayhem and absolute boredom of unemployment is not enjoyable, especially when you're a person like me: always needs to be active, always doing something. Having an obsessive personality is not good for unemployment.