She was so nice, the sex was great, always had a great time, it was fantastic… except she had a beard.
Life is full of compromise, DURRRRR. It is okay to be an utter failure, just don’t try to make up for it by blaming it on your mothers uncle – and take some responsibility. I promise it’s your fault.

The Restaurant was fantastic, the meal was delicious and well priced, except the chef likes to set patrons’ hair on fire with blowtorches for fun occasionally.

If you screwed up, admit it. Don’t blame the fact that you knifed someone in the face on your genes, or the attitude that the telephone operator gave you, or the bitter latte you just chugged down from the local liberal-arts coffee house.

This is not limited to just personalities, I constantly see this sort of behavior in sales, and other business departments that are incentivized by producing an good image. The problem with this is that there is an image arms-race and as a result, everyone lies. Talking to a group of potential vendors is like watching apes fight over the last banana, they will say or do anything to get a piece of action – including lying through their teeth and making up for it later with a layer of more lies explaining the previous lies by punting the blame onto someone, or something e’s terriblee.

He was a great friend, always a great laugh and up for a party… except he does like to murder people with swords every now and again.

People should just be honest and up front.  Let the opposite party call it how they see it. I promise you that in the end the recipient of the honesty will always be more satisfied with the information you have delivered as opposed to punting responsibility with a series of excuses.

The Titanic was an epically fantastic ship, except for a small problem with the rudder.

Now, when I think of the word ‘judgmental’, I think of something negative associated with it. I think it is the difference between constructive criticism, and “putting someone down”. The actual words used can  be the exact same, but the delivery method – and the spirit in which the message was delivered are the real determining factor between the two.

Now, the hard part for me is delivering the message in a way that it is absolutely clear to the recipient the spirit of the message. Now I am pretty good at picking up on subtleties, however – I have also been described as a ‘bull in a china shop’.

Knowing that I can be brutal, I take considerable effort to think before I speak, I consider this a courtesy that everyone deserves, but very few people think about. Sure, you know what you want to say, but do you know how the other person wants to hear it? It is hit-and-miss unless you think about it.

Now on sensitive topics, where you are ‘walking on eggshells’ so to speak, how does one handle that? Sometimes you are in a situation where you can’t win. Do you go forward and deliver the message that you think is important, and right, and just deal with the heat? I think depending on the situation it may or may not be the right thing to do. I did what I thought was right.  Although I will be the first to admit that there are situations that you can be in where it makes sense to swallow your pride and just keep your mouth shut.

In closing, I would like to add that this is not meant to be an advice column. Think of this as me venting through writing. Obviously communication is the most difficult thing that humans can do.

The brain has an infinite number of varieties of emotions, experience, and foresight – trying to communicate that using a few thousand words as vocabulary is an extraordinary difficult task. I happen to think that I have the ability to communicate around 1% of what I feel, be it a limitation of articulation, or the lack of trust I have in most people to actually express what I feel. I think that this is one of the great tragedies of humanity, and is something that I have come to terms with over the past few years. We all live life’s of solitude, and we share glimpses of ourselves with others as we are able.

Perhaps this sense of loneliness is what drives us into relationships, sometimes with ourselves, sometimes with aberrations and fantasy, or even with non-human entities (cars, ideals, objects). 

That is the human condition, I suppose.