In retrospect, it's possible to trace the beginning of the deterioration of my relationships with people to the moment I first met them. The day you first meet someone intriguing is like your twenty-first birthday, idiotically thrilling one moment like some kind of personal achievement and banal the next, and in some strange way inevitable and surprising at the same time, but all the same you can already feel the gloom of the relationship's senescence growing darkly within that first bright day. There's something about people's natures, there are some wonderful quirks but it's still just tedious variations on a theme, the unsurprising "revelations" of the normal everyday weaknesses, quivering insecurities, the noise of conventional opinions, the dramatic swoops between bravado and despair and between warm immediacy and cool distance. Then again I'm like everyone else, I don't want too much novelty in a personality, how wearying at times to be around a true eccentric, none of their reactions to stimuli or situations is in the least predictable, so many wildcards to take into account for the simplest of endeavors that it becomes exhausting and you just want to be alone and stare at your cat's ears. So I'm left craving something novel yet I'm actually more comfortable with mostly the usual business, the relatively narrow spectrum of acceptable personalities, at which point I rail against life's lack of surprises, how tiresome it all is. I suppose it's a matter of how one reacts to whatever little idiosyncracies are displayed, a matter of taste and affinity that's really beyond rational explanation, and there's also the matter of judging the authenticity of another's quirks, no one can stand a pretentious person or someone who's always performing some role, or rather performing a role in excess of the roleplaying one needs to engage in merely to live in society. It's possible I had a point when I started but I'll be damned if I know what it was. The subtext, possibly, is the basic question — Am I the kind of person I'd want to know better? Am I a "me" kind of person?