Last night, I fell…

Last night, I fell asleep with the cordless phone on the bed. I'd been talking. Which meant that when Kevin called, maybe ten minutes after I fell asleep, I heard and answered the phone. I have no idea what the first few minutes of that conversation were like.

Eventually, I started conversing like an awake human being. Eventually, it got to be 4 a.m. Eventually, it became clear that at the very least I'd really misread something he'd said recently, and that at the most, I'd sort of deliberately avoided dealing with it. Which is funny, sort of, because I'd just been thinking yesterday about how that's one of my worst character flaws, that if there's an unpleasant truth I don't want to deal with, I sometimes don't -- I just hide. Put my head in the sand and go do something else fun. Usually something I really want to do. This is sort of linked to the stuff the other day, about looking at the pleasant things, but it's worse than that, because I usually know deep down that the thing I'm avoiding dealing with is hurting someone else. I'm not generally a malicious person; this is the way I've most often hurt people in the past. By trying not to think about how my doing what I want to do will upset them. I've gotten better, but clearly not entirely.

If I were a Catholic again, I'd be asking God why the heck we needed free will anyway. Every once in a while, it feels really hard to be good -- a matter not just of making good choices when faced with crises, but really changing the way you think and act on a fundamental level. Ben Franklin thought he could do it by inculcating good habits; I guess I agree with him, but it's not as easy as it looks.

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